Due to family concerns, I’ve not been able to do as much writing as I would have liked in August, but I did want to share about my great first week of teaching.

First, I like my class. They seem to be very sweet kids. I’m sure that as the months go on, the hormones will hit, but this also makes some of their thinking more interesting, so it’s a sweet sour kind of situation. The kids appear to be tabla rasa at this time. By appear, I don’t mean to say they are without a personality, etc., but just that their personalities are not readily apparent in four short days. As time goes, they will reveal themselves to me, but already, I do find some of them to have very compelling aspects to their personalities.

I’ve given them a class survey to get to know them. I’ve also given them some beginning of year assessments. I’ve pared those down to really essential ones:  a paragraph writing assignment, a quiz of common homophone errors (our/are, there, their, they’re, etc.), a short selection of non-fiction reading with questions, and the assessment from our new math text. The last one was better than the assessment from the prior math text, but I’m not convinced it’s told me a lot. It may be too soon to be given them a test like this as knowledge tends to seep out of the child brain through the summer. The non-fiction test is not long. The passage takes up only about 2/3rds of the page, and it has 5 multiple-choice questions. It’s from our very out-of-date ELA text, Open Court 2002. That being said, it’s a good passage and test for paying attention to details, and even inference. The passage is about the change from the Chi’in to Han dynasties. The questions tease out that they can differentiate between statements about these two different dynasties, and that they can recognize generalizations about the values of each dynasty relying on inference.  This year I went through the two ELA tests with the students after grading them, to do analysis so they could learn. We made a chart about the homophones they can refer to when doing work.

I still need to look through the surveys from their parents, which often give important insights into what’s going on with my students. I’m looking forward to reading them, but I’m also enjoying having a couple days off.

Image credit: 40 number 1 hits, by steve, on Flickr