Disruptive Class

I have a first grade class that is chatty ALL THE TIME. There are times when I will be teaching and they'll sit and talk with a neighbor. I then ask those who were talking to sit by the wall. Many times when I ask him/her to sit out by the wall, they will sit there for a little while and then they take it upon themselves to crawl around, slide around on their backs on the gym floor. I then remind him/her to sit on their pockets by the wall. I seem to be having the same issues with the same kids consistently. I have had individual conversations with each kid about what is expected, how their grade is impacted, and I remind them frequently to make good choices.

My question: Does anyone have any good management strategies to decrease the frequency of some of these continuous problems?

Andrea/Assessment Update

This week we meet with Elisa (literacy guru working with the literacy cohort this year) to discuss our assessment binders and watch another lesson. I'm excited to see what her strategy groups look like, guided reading, and whole group as well. I recently met with my LC at school, and discussed my progress with an assessment binder for reading/writing. Turns out, my binder is going well, I'm conferring and having lots of guided reading, but I'm not doing much with strategy groups as I planned. I realized that I'm finding more strategies to focus on within my guided reading groups, rather than finding them during conferring. I've realized that regardless of reading ability, all of the students in my guided reading groups need to either review or practice certain strategies.

Are any of you doing full-blown strategy groups for literacy, as well as conferring, AND guided reading? I'm finding it very difficult to find a balance, especially since I lose 13 kids during my literacy block for a half hour for ESL/Title. Thoughts?

November Update

I have been working on my goal of posting and verbalizing content and language objectives during our literacy block. I have found it easier to write down the objectives for our comprehension units than phonics and grammar. I am still verbalizing the objectives during phonics and grammar, but I am working on writing them down as well so I have them ready for next year to just pull out of my files.

 I am also posting the essential questions for first grade by our morning meeting area. I go over the essential questions of the day for reader's, writer's and math workshop as well as our phonics. I am working on completing health, social studies and science.

One thing I am finding is that it is difficult to fit the objective on one sentence strip. My next step will be to start with the essential question in one color, then the content objective in another, and the language objective in another color. In this way it will be easier for me to write and easier for the students to follow.

 

I have been hanging the objectives from my easel so they are ready to go for the lesson.

Let me know if you have any strategies to make this more manageable and user friendly.

2nd Year

This is my second year teaching. It's amazing what I've noticed about myself and how comfortable I feel teaching even with only one year of experience under my belt. I've worked at three different schools with four different PE teachers. It has been a lot of fun being able to observe several different PE teachers and to see the different teaching styles. I've learned what I like and what I don't. I'll take what I like and incorporate it into my own teaching to improve my skills as a teacher. I'm excited to see what I will learn this year!

Fitness Testing- Should we take the weights of students?

Over the past year we've been in transition from administering the Presidential Physical Fitness test to the Fitness Gram. The tests and standards for the tests are different, and the way in which the data is collected/scored is also different. One aspect of the Fitness Gram is that the heights and weights are included in part of the assessment. I teach at two schools. At Pearson we did take the heights and weights of the 3rd-5th graders and at Sweeney we did not. This is one topic of discussion at this point. Some parents/administrators are concerned that doing so is not necessary. One parent explained last year to a teacher at Pearson that taking the weights can be damaging to the students because they are so young. Any thoughts about this?

In September I was so overwhelmed with the new Math Expressions curriculum that I did not put as much focus on literacy as I had planned to originally. My focus was more divided than I expected. I have not even drafted a rubric with the students yet. I wanted to draft a personal narrrative rubric with my class. I think I am going to end up using the one I used last year that is based on the six traits.
Hopefully, I will make the time to get back into my Amy Buckner texts and then create writing rubrics with my writers this year as I aspired to do. I am feeling glad that I made it through the "First 20 Days." My class has also been experiencing the Daily 5 and that has gone well. I am trying to find the bright side.

Pretending It's Still October...

Now that October is done, I'm feeling a bit better about things. Math is becoming easier and I've finally been able to pay more attention to literacy like I had wanted to. My team and I sat down and discussed the possibility of switching and leveled grouping by classroom for reading groups. Unfortunately, we realized we had to do it on a smaller scale (just switching students who are outliers) since our reading times don't completely align due to our lunch schedules. On the positive side, I now have 5 groups set up in my room and have figured out how to meet with 4 per day. (My two above grade level groups meet every other day.) My binder is all set up and I've even done running records on two of the groups!

I think my favorite thing that I'm doing is connecting my reading groups to what the kids are learning in science, social studies, and health at the time. It's like getting double the amount of time for those subjects and the kids are able to build really great schema for the text books (which are a little difficult for most of them). Luckily, we have a pretty extensive book room here at Sun Path (thanks to Cindy) and I haven't run into any problems yet finding books that are about the right topics.

I still haven't starting conferring. :( Maybe that will come this month?

Up and Running

So I just recently got this blog thing up and running and now I owe some posts! Whoops! Well, here goes:

In September I was just trying to hit the ground running. I was trying to focus on really improving my balanced literacy (specifically adding in new ways to teach reading in the way of conferring and new mini-lessons) but got completely thrown for a loop by the new math curriculum. Unfortunately, (as of the end of September) I didn't feel like I'd added too many new things to my teaching of balanced literacy because I'd been so concerned about all of the math stuff and just trying to get my DRA's done. Was anyone else having this problem?

Documentation of students

I worked in October on using a form to create a one page document of my students. I got this idea from meeting during the literacy meeting this month. I took all the information I had on the kido's and complied it into one page with the test scores, observations, hypothesis, and things to work on. This really helped me get ready for conferences this fall. I could quickly show the parents this one sheet rather then pull out a bunch of test scores. I have then been able to form small groups and begin interventions on those students who need them. I plan to continue to update this form through out the year to show the growth and progress of the students. I just thought that this was a quick way to look at a child so that I can pull small groups and confer with them on their strengths and weaknesses.

Continuing on with Assessments

At our Oct. 13th Staff Development Day, all the elementary PE teachers came together to create more assessments. This time we focused on 4th and 5th grade and wrote formal, end-of-the-quarter tests for each grade and each quarter. I felt really good about these tests that day and felt we had a very successful day. However, a few days later when I preparing to give the tests, at the end of the quarter, I started to rethink these tests. All the test questions were short answers, where they either had to list three points or explain an idea. These types of tests are not very conducive to my ELs and my SPED students. They are also more challenging for a lot of the students. So my colleague and I decided the students would benefit from different types of tests. We decided it was best to ask the classroom teachers which types of tests are most successful with 4th and 5th graders. I think I need to remember to do this more. I don't need to reinvent the wheel, I should just turn to my colleagues who have experience in formal testing. We were able to get some great ideas and created a Venn diagram test for this quarter.

With the younger students, we are continuing to assess by utilizing the checklists that we created. At first, we were just checking off if the student could do the skill, or leaving it blank if the student could not. This was a good start but after reflecting and reviewing the assessments, I determined it would be nice to have more specific info. Now while assessing a skill, I either give the student an "A", a "S", or a "N". A= always execute skill properly, S= sometimes, and N=never. This way I can see the students that sometimes struggle with the skill or always struggle with the skill and then make sure to work with them more.

Overall, I've been very pleased with our progress in creating and executing assessments. It has made me more focused on the specifics of the skill which allows me to guide the students and give them more feedback. We'll just keep trying new assessments to see what is successful and what works best for us and our students!