We Are Finished EQAO!!!!!

We have been hard at work on the six phases of the EQAO assessment for the last six school days.  Here is what our classroom looked like when we were hard at work.

Did you know that during the math portions of the assessment, that there were many resources available to the students?  Pictured here you will see the various blackline masters and manipulatives that were part of our "buffet".  The students were allowed to use any or all of these things at will.  I could not advise them what to use, when to use it, or how to use it. Thankfully we used these resources on a regular basis, so they should have been very familiar to everyone!

In addition, I asked for the students' reactions to the assessment.  Here are there ideas:

...this took less time than I expected...

...these are the same types of questions we have been doing all year...

...boring...

...this is easy...it is everything we did...

...I felt prepared...

...less difficult than I envisioned...

...I enjoyed writing the paragraph...

...I didn't like the options for the paragraph question because they didn't apply to my schema...

...we already read the text they gave us and we already wrote a persuasive letter in class...

...I got stuck on one question...

...math was better than literacy...

...one question in math was exactly the same as one we did in class...

...the prime factors question was easy and I liked it...

...this is fun because we are prepared...

...we did not have to construct any figures...

...I wish the final statements were provided consistently...

Hopefully their optimism will translate into quality responses and high results!  As least they are not stressed about it!

In the process, our class had a bit of fun with the acronym:  EQAO.  It is customary for students to say that the letters stand for "evil questions attacking Ontario", but our class has revamped it to be "easy questions attacking Ontario".  

Great job everyone!