So between a week up at Sly Park in the Sierra, parent conferences, and the craziness brought on my an early spring in California, I have become a very poor correspondent about goings on in my classroom. This is the time (before spring break) when it can become a grind, for the kids, and for me. Time goes both fast (look at how these posts have gotten away from me) and s-l-o-w, stretching everyone’s patience. It’s probably the time to change things up, but given a super-busy outside of school schedule I have, that hasn’t happened. What are the kids doing?

• They’ve started work on Country Reports that will lead to a Tour of Nations fair in April. The exciting part of this is that I’m including the inclusion students who come to my class, so it’s been a good experience for me to modify lesson plans, both for ability but also to reflect the different time availability of different students;
• In general, the Common Core mathematics standards are less ambitious, and not as wide-ranging (read impossibly broad) as the state standards in California they are replacing. That being said, one thing that Common Core will not fix is the headache of teaching fractions to students. Sixth graders are expected to do the four basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) with fractions and mixed-numbers. Every year I have students crash into the wall of fractions, and this year is no exception. I still haven’t figured out a “magic bullet” beyond, keep hitting it, when the kids and I are too frustrated take a break, and come back to it later.
• We’ve finished a unit on Taking a Stand which the kids and I generally enjoy. It didn’t feel like I connected as well as I did with last year’s class, but it was still worthwhile. I’m still processing what could be done differently, but I imagine I’ll think it over during spring break and summer vacation.
• The kids did not connect to the unit on Ancient India and China as well as last year, but we had students with that cultural background. I find that kids pay more attention when there is someone in the class who can make a personal connection. This has helped in discussions of California’s landscape when I talk about my family home in the San Gabriel mountains, and the cycle of fire, rain, flood/landslide, and living through two major earthquakes (Sylmar and Loma Prieta).

Waste less EARTH do less homework[Day270]* by Chapendra, on Flickr