Search results matching tags 'classroom management' and 'assessment'

Landforms Activity and Gradebook Printable

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:16:00 GMT

This week in Science we have been learning about Earth's Land Features. All week we took notes, learned hand gestures, and watched a video, and then we made a landform flipbook. I have to say, it came out SOOOO cute!! I got the idea from an AIMS lesson and adapted it for the SC landforms. Here is what it looks like completed!

And here it is in action!

I don't have the downloadble file on my hard drive so I will be back tomorrow with that for you to download FREE!

And in other news, I finally made a printable gradebook for me to use and wanted to share in case you need one too! =) My life has been so much easier when entering grades into Powerschool with this!

To download this file, just click the image below! You will need the font, GingersnapPrint (free in my sidebar) to look like mine. You can of course change your font if you wish. There are also printable pages for Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies includes but not pictured below.

And I'm off to bed!! I'm pooped!

Problem Solving Words and Strategies

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:07:00 GMT

So, I am sure many of you have seen these on Pinterest or The Teacher Wife's page.

And maybe you have seen this from Oh Boy, 4th Grade.

Well, I have taken these two lovely ideas and made a perfect marriage! After seeing these two wonderful ideas, I thought it would be a great thing to have glued inside my students math journals!

Let me know what you think! I hope I didn't break any rules by using these two ideas and combining them into one...

Click on the picture to download!

thinking big

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 23:08:08 GMT

Our children are away at camp, so last night my husband and I had a Wednesday date for dinner and a movie (“Crazy, Stupid, Love” — highly recommended). At dinner, he said, “Do you have any goals for this coming school year?”

And with that, I was off.

I want to have a clean desk. Every day. I’m going to have to rethink a lot of things about storage and daily routines, but it would be so great to have a clean desk.
I want to reduce clutter in the classroom.
I want to have a class binder that has all my important info in one place, including…
…my lesson plans, which I still want to figure out how to do on the computer. I want to come up with a sort of spreadsheet/chart that blocks off the hours in the day, where I can write what we will be doing each chunk of time.
I want to be better at teaching rhyming and alliteration.
I want to write more repeated interactive readaloud lesson plans.
I want to make time to do the RIRA discussions every week.
I want to do water science with the water table. I planned on doing it last year, but didn’t get around to it.
I want to work on teaching vocabulary, and continue working on creating my own set of vocabulary cards.

“So, resting on your laurels, right?” he joked.

It’s August, and my time at home is slowly vanishing, but I am starting to get in the right mindset. I think I will be happy to go back, when the time comes.

either I’m very lucky or I’m some sort of genius

Anonymous — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:53:38 GMT

On Friday we had a visitor who was there to observe one of my students, who is being assessed for possible special ed services. She sat during centers time and watched and took notes.

The art center was full of kids making ants out of black paper and then adding glitter glue to them. This was thrilling, but they managed to stay calm and focused. The usual suspects sat at the lego table, and we had a small bunch working hard at the writing center. I was at the games table playing Go Fish, as I mentioned in my last post. The morning was busy and productive, and the kids were calm and content.

Later, when she was leaving, the visitor said, “You have a really great bunch of kids this year.”

I agreed with her, of course. They are a lovely group of children.

But in my head, I was thinking, “There is a reason they are so busy and happy and well-behaved. There is a reason they have learned so much this year. There is a reason this classroom is so calm and runs so smoothly.”

And that would be me. (I know, modest much?)

What shall we learn?, continued

Anonymous — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:24:29 GMT

This is the first card I’ve got posted above my meeting area blackboard. Here’s what I do to help the children meet these goals:

Copy/print own name: The children are expected to sign in every day. Some of them could write their names already, but others had no idea at all. I showed them that they can scribble or do pretend writing, and a few of them are still relying on that method. Others have started to write the first letter of their names to stand for the whole name. When they are ready, I show them how to write the next letter, and so on. By the end of the year they will all be able to write their first names. For the kids who already could, I show them how to write their names with only the first letter capitalized, instead of writing it in all caps. When they are ready, I might even teach them how to write their last names. Note: sometimes I don’t have to do anything. Their parents and older siblings learn that they are expected to write their names, and teach them how to do it at home.
Be able to listen to a story: This one seems easy, but I have a few students who really aren’t listening. One little girl doesn’t understand (native English speaker, but with some developmental delays) so she plasters a polite grin on her face and then tunes out. Some of them don’t listen because they don’t speak English. We have story time daily, and sometimes twice a day. My Americorps member and my assistant read to children one-on-one sometimes, particularly with the kids who aren’t being read to at home. I try to make story time alive and exciting by only choosing really good books to read — and by throwing in lots of Mo Willems!
Answer questions about a story: This week I finally started to do my weekly “special story” — a repeated interactive readaloud. Only some of the kids can answer my questions about the story — others raise their hands and then offer an answer to a question I didn’t ask. (“What do you think the signmaker was thinking when he came back to town and the people chased him into the woods?” J: “He run away.”) My hope is that with a repeated interactive readaloud every week, we will learn how to think about stories, talk about them, and learn how to answer more abstract questions.
Learn uppercase letters/learn lowercase letters/learn letter sounds: This is a part of our daily routine, as I have mentioned here before.

Tomorrow: our next set of goals.

teachers and time

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:41:34 GMT

So I’m reading this Atlantic Monthly article about “What Makes a Good Teacher,” and thinking about the finding that good teachers spend a lot of time preparing for their classes. And each morning lately I have had trouble getting through everything I need to do, so time is on my mind.

I understand why spending a lot of time on preparation helps a teacher be a good teacher, and I feel bad about not spending enough of my own time on preparation these days. It’s harder for me to be willing to do it now — back when I had little kids at home and little kids at school my whole life and all my time was about little kids needing me. Now my children are older and more independent, and I’m ready to claim some of my time back. It’s hard to keep coming in to work early and staying late, and so I just don’t do it as much anymore. I guard my private time fiercely — I think I’ve earned the right to read some novels, and I know that if I devote all my time to the needs of all the different children in my life, I will become stressed and unhappy, which won’t be good for any of them, whether they be my sons or my students.

Then when I’m at work, time is an issue. There is so much that I’d like to do — or need to do — each day, that it is hard to get to it all. Today we watched a clip from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and we visited National Geographic kids to watch videos about fish (we particularly liked the one about the mola), and we visited Starfall to learn about the letter L, and those were just the things we did using the video data projector. We also had gym class, and centers time (of course), and morning meeting. In my role as mentor teacher, I am supposed to be assessing my kids for writing workshop (a pre-assessment to gauge their progress as we get into the writer’s workshop process, which is next up on our staff development plan), but I decided to put it off until tomorrow, and do an intro to writer’s workshop instead of reader’s workshop. Or maybe try to do both, if I shorten centers time. Argh.

There’s also my internal to-do list. A person from the early childhood department came this morning to do a letters and sounds assessment with my class, because I’ve been to busy to get it done myself. (It was great that she came — I know I’m lucky to have that kind of support.) I remembered to track down the social worker who speaks Spanish to talk to the child I’ve been worrying about as a possible case of neglect. I forgot to get any portfolio assessment done at centers time. I almost forgot to write the morning message or teach the class about the letter L. I ran out of time for story time. And I have lots of things to do as a mentor — books about teaching writing to kids that I need to read, and observation reports that I need to finish.

At the end of the morning, however, there was extra time. The bus was late picking up the children. We huddled inside the door, waiting, and we sang songs, practiced counting in English and Spanish, and then talked about lunch. I told them I was going to have chicken and rice for my lunch — and then the children helped me remember the phrase arroz con pollo to describe it. The Latino children’s faces glowed, and they told me, “I eat that, too!”

well-intentioned low standards

jtspencer — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:32:00 GMT

The first few weeks for me are always the hardest. After a rather sedentary summer, I find myself swept into motion. Energetically, I run from place to play, smile, give compliments, offer instruction. I fail to learn all the names and I know even fewer of their stories. Yet, the toughest part is that I always recieve pushback from high standards. Despite the fact that I try to make lessons interesting and humorous, there is a sense that they resent the amount of reading and writing we do in a social studies class.

This year was different. Half of my class were students from last year, so they remained positive. The others, for some reason, rose to the challenge without fighting it. Yet, the one class that has given me trouble is my eighth grade honors. To their credit, they lost their teacher from the year before when she was transferred. However, I have been dissapointed with some of their reactions. When I share my idea of a paragraph, they respond, "We always heard it had to be four sentences." When I explain that we will read Plato, they say, "Junior high kids can't get philosophy."

I make no apologies for setting standards high. I require homework daily. I pull students in during my prep period for tutoring. Students have a lot of fun, but they also write at least four paragraphs a day. (Two during the class and two for homework) To me, it is important, not just because they need it for college or for a job, but because these are skills they need for life.

What often happens is that well-intentioned teachers drop down the standards for their students. Often with the "these kids" clause, they provide a sort of soft racism that can do major damage: "These kids have rough homes, so we shouldn't give homework" or "These kids come from a bad environment so they don't need more rules and strucutre at school." "It's not fair to make a kid who is learning English read and write so much." They offer pseudo-sociological explanations that reveal a cultural bias: "Black kids are just louder and that's okay. They should be loud in my class." or "Latino kids aren't raised to have respect for authority." Since when is disrespect a cultural trait?

So, I think I might be soap boxing and building myself up in the process. I just thing that low expectations are really hurting low-SES students.

recovering what we lost in standardized education

jtspencer — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:15:00 GMT

After taking so many theory classes this summer, I am left with a mental overload. I enjoy the dialogue and debates, yet I can't help but feel that none of the "isms" really worked for me. Constructivism was great, but often unrealistic. Behaviorism seemed to treat kids like robots. I loved parts of the critical pedagogy, but I think there is a time and a place to follow the social institutions. So, I sat down and asked, "Why did I first start to teach?" I began with a confusing web and then typed up this table.

I think my heart wars against the standardized education system and I yearn for authenticity, so I call my philosophy "authentic education," but I realize it's nothing new. I raile against the one-size-fits-all, standardized approach, where students are data and teachers are trained automatons. The term "authentic" is probably out there and there is nothing profound about it. Yet, to my core, this is what I believe:

Category	Philosophy
Purpose	To think better about life
Teachers	Idea of vocation – based upon who you are Role of a mentor Live what they teach
Student Identity	Duality Need the freedom to be themselves
Methods / Pedagogy	Higher-level thinking Differentiated Instruction Creativity A balanced approach to technology Service Learning
Content	Relates to life Leads to wisdom Concept of mystery Personal Philosophical Practical
Classroom Management	Realistic consequences – logical Based upon a relationship Leadership rather than management
Assessment	Based upon growth Realistic – fits with life