Absences and new students midyear...

One of my biggest bugaboos as a parent has been the difficulty in catching up with missed work and instruction when my daughter has been sick and absent from school. In younger grades, she was usually excused from the assignments she had missed, but there was also no real support for her to learn the content she had missed.  Now, in middle school, she is expected to make up all the work, and to find out what the work was by asking classmates.  In some classes this is easier than others:  she has friends to ask, and the work is from the textbook.  But at other times it is harder because she has no good friends in the class, or the work was a worksheet of which she can not easily get a copy.

Students who arrive midyear go through all this times ten.

I wish classrooms had a student job  to collect homework assignments and materials for the kids who are absent.  Since there will almost always be at least one student absent, it makes sense to build support for those students into each day's lesson plans.

Similarly, since most classes get 1 or 2 new students in the course of the year, why not plan for them from day 1?  The class could create extra reading, math, and science folders and so forth to give like a gift to new students when they arrive.

Slow workers...

A couple of the kids in my main placement are slow, but accurate, workers.  In math, for example, they usually are able to solve the problems, but if the class is assigned 20 textbook problems and  then followup work, they will only get through 5-10 of the textbook problems.  My CT has modified their assignment so they are only asked to do every other textbook problem, and that is usually all they finish in math, if even that.

I realize that I don't understand why they are slow - is it stamina, focus, motivation, or something else?  As I think of these kids heading to middle school, where classes are increasingly tracked, I suspect they'll end up on the lower track even though they understand the material.

Should these kids have speed goals, or is that completely inappropriate?  Is speed developmental?  A good place to start in figuring it out will be to ask them...

More math instruction pondering...

So, I am struggling to keep math whole group instruction short.  My first couple of math lessons were long, with lots of eliciting of student thinking, and yet the kids still did poorly on the assessment from the curriculum that follows each lesson, and my CT suggested I shoot for 10 minutes max on whole group instruction.

My new thinking is to start each lesson with a warmup -- something to get the kids thinking about the concept before the group teach starts.  I think of it a little like the activation of background knowledge that we talked about in literacy.  Then perhaps the group teach could start with kids already focussed on the topic, and it could move a little quicker.

Of course this seems like a no-brainer, but part of the challenge is that the math group lesson is taught when the kids come back from recess, while they eat their snacks.  Maybe the warmup activity could be done by table groups, but my class does not have a culture of effective group work...  But that's another struggle for another day.

Personal abacus...

I bought this bracelet at a craft fair last fall, because I liked the idea of it as a mini abacus on a bracelet. I think knitters make and use them to keep track of stitches or rows or something.  I've also seen them with several strands of 10 beads.  Here's a cute video of a kid giving instructions on making one.

It's back to my main placement tomorrow, with an eye over these next two weeks on how to set up some procedures while I am teaching that can meet the requirements of the edTPA.  While I expect I'll be tired of the rubrics by May, right now I think they'll be useful in helping me negotiate some room to teach in my own style.

Handing over iPad to a student...

I was so excited this week to find out how to lock the iPad to the current app (directions below).  I have been wanting to hand my iPad over to students to use (unsupervised) with ExplainEverything, but have worried that they might want to investigate everything I have on my iPad.

In my last week in my placement, the kids had an online research project, and it was taking the netbooks forever to login to the network, so I tried my iPad and it was fast, so I gave it to a group of kids to use.  Meanwhile on the other side of the room, a group of girls had managed to login with their netbook, and they had interrupted their research to search google for  "what is [one of the girls names] good at?"  It turns out that, somewhere in the world, someone with that name is good at some things that are not rated G.  I'm not sure if the school network would have let them click through to the site, but they sure could see the list of the search results. The kids were redirected back to the research project, and I'm happier handing over my iPad having some control over what the kids do with it (which isn't to say that I think kids shouldn't use google, but that perhaps they need closer supervision and direction when they do).

To lock the iPad to the current app: go to Settings, General, Accessibility, and then scroll down to Guided Access. Flip the switch and tap Set Passcode to create a four-digit passcode. Next, find the app you want to give the kids access to  and launch it. Once it comes up,  tap the home button three times. At that point you can disable buttons and portions of the screen.  To leave the app, you would have to enter your passcode.

Project Learning Tree...

I get so caught up in class and homework and chores and my to-do list that it is easy to forget to go outside and just notice.  The Project Learning Tree workshop was a good reminder for myself as myself and also as a teacher of the richness of getting outside.  When we hosted out math buddies this past week, my group was happy to be outside, and they were willing to count and estimate boards on the boardwalk, listen with closed eyes to bird calls, pick through a compost bin looking for worms, and compare the speed of running forward and backward. 

I took a biology class to qualify for the teaching program, and one of the assignments was to go to 5 different places, and just notice till you had a list of 20 living things you had seen at each place.  My lists ran to hundreds, and I was grateful for the assignment because I enjoyed doing it, and wouldn't have on my own.  Chances are I'll give a similar assignment to my future students...

Keeping whole group instruction short in math...

I taught several math classes in the last few weeks at my placement, with the last one officially observed by my CT. 

The primary feedback of my CT was to spend less time on whole group instruction. She advocated moving swiftly to small group instruction, and delivering the bulk of the content there.  I'm uneasy with this because it means leaving the 3rd of 5 small groups with 20-30 minutes of independent work when they may not have the content knowledge to do it.  (Groups 4 & 5 probably could).

For the next time I teach, I'm wondering about keeping whole group instruction short, but having a stack of hint cards for the problems that kids could pull from.  I'd like to have the kids create hint cards themselves once they understand the concept.  Perhaps this might get to the application or analysis level of Bloom's taxonomy (applying the concept to a new problem, and analyzing what's important?).  The hint cards could be used later with absent students, or for the following year...

Part of the math lesson:  to make an equivalent fraction game.  Here's one: