Auction Basket and Science Assignment

Two completely unrelated topics to let you know about today.

ILS Celebration Auction
The annual ILS Celebration Auction, part of Celebration Weekend which includes the Fun Fest and the beginning of Lutheran Schools Week, is coming up fast. The auction is on Saturday evening, February 28.

We are continuing our tradition of each class donating a basket to be auctioned off that evening. This year the fourth grade is doing a beach basket. Trying to organize which people should send what item can be difficult, and in this case, could result with our basket having four tubes of SPF50.

A parent has volunteered to do the purchasing for our basket. The suggested donation for the class is $3-5 per family, but please donate whatever you feel is best. Remember, all donations go directly to the school. Last year the weekend earned over $40,000. The fourth grade basket earned (if I remember correctly) $200 by itself, more than doubling the amount donated toward its purchase.

Also, please send your ideas for a beach basket. What needs to go to the beach? What essential item must come along in order to make a trip to beach complete?

Today's Science Assignment
Today we took our science test. It's a take home test, and you'll probably see it tonight. It's a bit...different...from most tests.

I wanted to do something other than multiple choice, fill in the blank, and short answer, so I wrote a test. It's a little silly, and I told the fourth graders to have fun with it. The questions are designed for them to be creative, but also require them to know information from the chapter.

For example, one question asks what kind of volcano they would like to visit on vacation. There are three tour companies listed. Would they want to tour a dormant, active, or violently erupting volcano? I told them there's no correct answer, but their explanations about why they'd like to visit one and not the other two will show me whether or not they understand the different types of volcanoes.

I encouraged them to be creative, but at the same time to be sure their answers were clear and based on good information. They started slowly, but seemed to get more comfortable as they wrote. We'll see tomorrow, I guess.