This is a great experiment and lots of fun to do.

When he was in middle school–and stuck in a broadly graded mini-classroom with a teacher and an aide pushing worksheets all day long (none of which were particularly aligned to the tested curriculum), I did spend some time searching the web for some solid, aligned, engaging and hands-on lessons as examples of what might be done. I found this really wonderful piece on embalming a chicken (it involved salt and plastic bags and draining–it sounded like the kind of thing those weird middle school minds would really freak out about). It would really have fit into what the social studies curriculum required–which had to do trade and culure in early Egypt. If I ran the world, those kids would have been wrapping that chicken up in gauze and decorating it with symbols and looking up on the internet to see where the materials came from and measuring the salt that was required and the weight of the water that drained out. We could have spend hours doing things that absolutely aligned with every part of the curriculum. And I really believe there might have been some stuff that “stuck” when they were taking the tests.

I don’t run the world–and that class never moved away from the worksheets. And it turns out that my son was the only kid from his grade level in there, so the rest were supposed to be aligned to other benchmarks and standards. So on they went with the worksheets.

But it wasn’t the tests.