I’m doing a bit for Larry Ferlazzo’s Ed Week column on the final weeks of school, and this post will expand on some of the ideas there.

My first rule is to avoid countdowns, and to really avoid doing them with the kids. There’s a countdown on the staff restroom whiteboard that’s been going since April, but I really do not like thinking about the “end of school” and summer until about 5-6 weeks from the end. Doing a countdown with the kids seems to give them license to act as though it’s all over already, so I avoid that.

The kids at this point know the end is nigh, they don’t need me reinforcing the idea.  The behavior documented in my Windy Week Edition hasn’t improved much, even as the skies have settled down. My gambits to deal with this include periods of silent contemplation/meditation. I have no idea if this is therapeutic for them, but it’s stopped a lot of migraines from happening to me, as their volume level is truly excruciating at times. I’ve also added dodgeball with the teacher to let everyone get there ya-yas out. We play with carpet balls, which make injury pretty impossible, but what kid doesn’t want to have a shot at me at this point?

We’ve stopped doing our math exchange, and I now just have all my kids with me. I’m doing exploration activities. Last week was looking at probability and patterns in games, like cards, Yahtzee, etc. Next week will be fraction concepts with pattern-blocks and Legos. I may do some more work on a lesson I did earlier on distributive property and expand it to fractions. All of this is very hands on, with lots of independent-work time, but some writing, etc. I start it out structured (some fact worksheets, silent time, and a short demo from me), as they are coming in from recess and pretty wound-up.

In ELA, and social studies  I’ve been emphasizing a lot of writing in the assessment. This week, I gave them only one short-response question to answer, instead of the usual two. I want to just see if they can still write after a three week break during testing season. Everyone did about as good as before, and some did better, so I’m going to offer them their choice of assessment forms (look at the bottom of this post for examples of what happened last time I did this) next Friday. Last time I “offered” this (I asked them how they preferred to be assessed), they did not read the options carefully, assumed they only had the choice of multiple-choice or writing, and picked multiple-choice. They saw what the few peers who paid attention got to do last time, so they are primed to make some interesting choices. I’m looking forward to this.

Science is all about Science Fair projects (which will be displayed at Open House on 5/29).  I’m very pleased with how well the kids have done with formulating questions about their subject and not just wanting to start building. I have one kid (very good with hands-on stuff, and handy to have in class) who did this, but I’m using this as a chance to work with him on planning and writing first, and he’s paired with a kid who excels at “thinking” about things really deeply. I’m looking forward to that pair, and all the projects.

32 by dpika, on Flickr

Be careful of what you ask…

Writing is not going on as strongly as it had been. I think the kids may be getting a bit too comfortable with the routine. Some are rushing and making careless mistakes. I’m going to look at taking a break from the writing routine or change what I’m asking for. I do a weekly writing prompt to check in with students. I’ll often ask them questions about their learning and my teaching. This week, I asked how they preferred to get assessed. The majority preferred multiple choice tests, because they were “easier” to do. Words like, faster, easy to figure out if I have the right answer, easy to guess if I don’t know the answer, came up a lot. I gave them a variety of choices (multiple choice, writing short answer, writing essays, reports, trifold projects, comics/graphics, or something else). The students that indicated “other” non-writing/multiple-choice were some of my lowest students who felt that they just failed on those type of tests. Many are great artists and liked the idea of drawing. I think next week I’ll give them a writing/drawing option on the weekly assessment.

Is my math program is adding up?

We do an exchange for mathematics. It’s not a pure “ability” leveling. The differences are the different levels of support. I’m in the mid-range group, which has the largest range of abilities. We ran into a wall with some of the computation around fractions and percentages. Instead of continuing to bang my head, and having my kids bang theirs, against a wall, I’ve moved onto geometry, and I’m doing a review at the start of each day of fractions or percentages, then giving them a weekly quiz on what we reviewed. I’m seeing some progress, so I’m going to keep this in mind next year when we will have only two classes, and the levelling will not be feasible.

Daisies by niallkennedy, on Flickr

I’ve been perfecting my weekly assessment rubric. I’m coming to the opinion that there is no perfect rubric, but when you’re starting out, there is the temptation to find “the” rubric. I’ve got a workable 5 pointer. I think what makes it work is that I know what I’m looking for (which was helped by the rubric), and probably more importantly, the kids are beginning to understand what I’m looking for.

In other news, students delivered their persuasive speeches. Some were outstanding, some needed more work. I chalk this up to not giving them great preparation. Next year, I’m thinking I’ll have a more structured approach to public speaking.

Photo Credit: No273 13 Oct 2009 Sneeze by mcfarlandmo, on Flickr

• Having students work with questions they themselves have generated;
• Having students work on single paragraph writing around an organizational pattern to guide their analysis;
• Having students return to the same topics, and same text to dig in deeper.

Hieroglyphics are like computer icons because today we use icons like smiles to say words. Letters like LOL tells about what we are doing. I wonder if the Egyptians would have had smiles in hieroglyphics?

The thing that allows so many creatures and plants to live there is the Nile river. Since the river is so long it picks up nutrients along the way to the delta. When it floods all the nutrients start going everywhere. It’s good for everyone and thing.

Image Source: Clock number 12 by Leo Reynolds, on Flickr

Once again, I’m not keeping up with my work life online. Part of this is because I’m spending more time staying in touch with parents this year, so I thought I’d start this week’s report by sharing how I’m doing that.

First, I am using the Googles to simplify my life in a couple of ways. I started a Gmail account for class administrivia last year, and I’ve carried it over to this year. When I got my class list, I looked up all my parents’ email addresses and cell phone numbers, and started to add them to my contacts.  I use this as the base to send out a weekly email update about what the class is doing.  Here is last week’s communique:

This week:

• At last Monday’s Sixth Grade Class Meeting, we prepared to sell BooGrams by making die-cuts, and students sold at the end of the week.
• We started new units/chapters in all our subject areas. Social Studies was early civilizations. Science was about climate and weather.
• Our class will be starting a new novel, From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, thi
• Ms. Noelle visited our class and we learned about African Art. I will be posting pictures in the next few days, and the art will be featured in the office in the month of November. She will return to our class on November 13.
• Class Progress Reports went home with your child on Thursday. Students who stay with me for mathematics also received progress reports on Wednesday. If you need a copy by email, let me know.

Next week:

• Monday will be another Sixth Grade Class Meeting. All sixth grade students are invited to attend. The meetings go from 2:00 – 2:30. The next few meetings are to work on a project to sell BooGrams to help students do fundraising for their Sly Park trip. Please let your child stay to participate.
• We will be learning more about early farming communities, and weathering and erosion (including a video on Grand Canyon).
• Students will be getting their own individual blogs. I had them write a request for this last week, and next week on Thursday, I will set them up blogs with students.

Calendar:
10/29 Sixth Grade Class Meeting
11/12 Veterans Holiday
11/15 – 11/16 Parent Conferences/Minimum Days
11/19 – 11/23 Thanksgiving Holiday Week
11/26 – 11/30 Parent Conferences/Minimum Days
12/24 – 1/4 Winter Break

Our calendar is on on our blog http://sacschoolblogs.org/msmercer2012/ and http://tinyurl.com/room11calendar

I have all but one parent email address. I’ve gotten a lot of kudos for providing them with this information, so I think it’s working well.  By keeping it to a bullet list, I can just move up next week to last week, change the tense, and add some details and voila it’s done. Not a ton of work, but worth the time.

In addition, for more immediate and individual contact, I use GoogleVoice to send SMS/txt messages to parents. This is very helpful for parents who have quick questions about homework, etc. to get a hold of me, and for me to contact them about their child.

I’m also trying to post photos of student work on our class blog, etc. Since I have Acrobat X, I turn all homework sheets, etc. into PDFs which I attach, so if their child “loses” their homework, they can just print the sheet off. I also can send electronic copies of academic updates for their child. I’ll share a bit more about how I’m tracking student work, and where I’d like to go with that in a future post.

Image Credit: Number 8 on 08-08-08-F8-8th sec-ISO 800 by settme3, on Flickr

Math Exchange

This class is my biggest challenge. I keep my most challenging students, and add a batch of talkative/attention-challenged kids from the other two classes. Mixed in are a bunch of obedient, but quiet types, some of whom need help but are shy to ask for it. This week was the piece-de-resistance though. Thursday was really awful, while I had a parent observing, then came Friday. I discovered on Thursday that the kids did not have as good a grip on subtraction of integers (which they had done with a sub) as I thought. As if I do not have enough problems, I had our district issued text undermining me. The text comes with sample problems on PowerPoint, which saves me from having to write them up and it projects better than putting the small print of the textbook on document camera. Here was the first problem:

4 – (-5) =

and two of the choices were -1 and 9

The correct answer is…9, but the slidedeck listed -1. This, of course, made more sense to my confused students, because they are used to subtraction problems resulting in a smaller, not a larger number, so I had to spend a lot of time “un-teaching” this errata. The text has a history of errors, and the grade 1-5 versions were recalled and replaced to settle a lawsuit by local school districts. Even then, I still found errors in the fifth grade text last year.  I try to check the text, keys, etc. before using them, but things slip by, and frankly I’m a little peeved that I have to “proof-read” a text that tax-payers paid good money for. So that’s my rant, and I’ll move on.

Gardens

We have two types of gardens on our campus. a native plant garden,

and, garden boxes planted with commercial seeds. The garden boxes are overseen by a terrific former parent/community volunteer. Since I haven’t done the garden box before, my students have to put the box together to plant in this year. A group did this on Friday afternoon. I could NOT have come up with a better activity for that time, as the kids were full of energy and this was just the outlet. Here’s a picture of them at work.

Hatchet and Language Arts

We’re finishing up a unit on Perseverance and finished reading the novel Hatchet. The kids really enjoyed the novel and were hanging on up to the very end. I’m going to have them do an activity from the study guide book on making a newspaper article about the main character Brian. I’m also going to have them work in groups reading parts of the novel, and answering questions. I’m using questions that I picked up at a Common Core committee meeting I attended this week.

Science

We finished up a chapter on Earth Sciences. I decided to create my own assessment and to start that out, I asked students what they found most interesting about the chapter. Most focused on volcanoes. I did a short response with four questions focused on cause and effect between tectonic plates and either volcanoes, earthquakes, and the movement of continents, and gave them a choice of 2 out of 4 to answer. I also want to feature visual literacy, so I gave them diagrams of volcanoes, the earth structure, etc. to fill in.

Other than classroom management issues  around the math swap, it’s been okay. I’m on top of a routine of lesson delivery, giving work, and checking it in, so a routine has begun. I even managed a lemon to lemonade transformation, when one of my brighter but more challenging students expressed a skepticism about the replacement of “x” for the multiplication with the “•”. It was the end of the day, and I had to cut him off, but I thought about it. This is farther along into Algebra than I’ve ever taught, and the kids really have to let go of a lot of what they’ve been taught as “normal” up to this point. So I checked in with him the next day before a lesson that was about algebra expressions, and had him model a traditional multiplication problem, “3 x 5″ and had him replace the numbers with variables (something that 5th grade mathematics does, but not as quickly as in sixth), “x” and “y” so he and the kids could see it would not work to write “x x y” as a problem. I then had the kids come up and write the various ways to show “x times y”, and told them to get ready to see those more often, and the “x” less.

The other news is that I’ve started having students comments on our class blog. They were all appropriate, but many were not complete sentences, etc. so have to be redone. I expect this as part of the process of them learning what I expect. This year I’ve created logins on the edublogs domain for all of them, and it is MUCH easier once they are logged in. I’m hoping to have them do put their writing for the first unit, a narrative essay, on the blog.

Two big regrets about this week. Prior to this, I had a good routine for assigning work, giving kids enough time to finish it, and checking it in, outside of math. That was out the window this week. Because of that, we didn’t finish one of the better stories in the language arts anthology, an excerpt from Julie of the Wolves, which I would have liked to have spent more time on.

Photo Credit: Green Canister Buoy Number 3 in the Morro Bay, CA Harbor Channel adjacent to Morro Rock, inside the breakwater. by mikebaird, on Flickr

I’m doing good. My class, while not perfect, has many positive attributes, and I like the kids even when they cause me to raise my eyebrows at the sort of behavior that one can expect from 11 year olds as hormones overtake all good sense and control.  What did we do? We didn’t take pictures, I didn’t take pictures. I’m sorry I will do better next week, when I start having some of my kids who have gotten permission, to take pictures of our learning. Okay, now for the meat.

We started learning about first humans and the kids really seemed to enjoy it, even though we read two lessons from our rather turgid textbook. I will say they had nice short bios on Mary Leakey and “Lucy”. Additions that engaged the kids were a paper copy of the National Geographic map that went along with their story on early human evolution, the first episode of the NOVA video series “Becoming Human”, and cave handprint stencil activity that we did. Unfortunately, I used paper that stuck to the table and ripped when I tried to get it up. We will be re-doing that this week, and I should have pictures and video. I also showed a BrainPop video on Human Evolution as an into activity.

We went out to the native plant garden at our school, and I had them do some short writing of sentences using sensory descriptions of what they could smell, hear, and see. We’ll be going back this week and taking pictures and video. This was a good activity for the end of the school day as it allowed them to get out of their seats, etc.

We started reading Hatchet, and they liked it a lot. This is going well. I’m doing the reading right after lunch, and we’ve been doing a whole class discussion on what we’ve read. My favorite was when they worked on developing questions using the Bloom’s Taxonomy Flip Books in groups, and then answered the question.

They did get time on the MacBooks. I just had them read some other student blogs, answer a technology survey, and do activities related to what we’re learning about. I’ll be introducing blog comments next week. You can follow us at: http://sacsshoolblogs.org/msmercer2012.

Image Credit: Two of Arts – 2000 Visual Mashups by qthomasbower, on Flickr

It was a pretty good week. Feedback from one of the kids about day one was that he liked me, but I wasn’t warm and friendly. I wasn’t trying to do the “don’t smile until Christmas” routine, but I did make an effort to be friendlier as the week went on. There is not a lot of reason to crab on this group of kids, who are very sweet for sixth graders. Normally kids in this grade-level are feeling out their adolescent attitudes. This group on initial impression does not seem prone to eye-rolling and talking back, so I’m counting my blessings.

Things were going so well that we did a side trip on Wednesday to the native plant garden we have at the school. Up next week…hand print stencils (we are studying early humans), and journaling while visit the garden again. We’ll also start reading our first novel, Hatchet. I’m looking forward to it, and I think the kids are too. The only cloud on the horizon is that are census is low at the grade-level (27 per class average, with a maximum of 33, and the district would prefer we were at least at 30). Since I’m the low-person on the seniority poll (with 12 years), any shrinking of classes will result in my being “bumped” out of the site. The next grade level (fifth) is only one child over making a split difficult. We’ll have to see if the district will “float” our lower numbers, or close a class.

Photo Credit: Number one-1= by Sheba_Also, on Flickr