Lots of good stuff going on but hard to find the time and energy to write about it. The times when things are going well are often the hardest to motivate myself to blog about. I spent some time out of the class at Common Core math trainings, and online time writing about CCSS ELA.

Going digital

I missed putting up a podcast for week 5, but made up for it this week, by including a class discussion. I had hesitated to record them because they seemed shy and not as forthcoming as prior classes, but the students really seemed to “kick it up a notch” being recorded, making me wish I had started this sooner. The recordings can be found here.

Silver lining, or?

One of the things I discovered in my training is that Common Core is emphasizing working with integers less in elementary and sixth grade (they may want more in fractions). As a result, my kids who have been using a text based on the broader and more aggressive California standards, have already been exposed to integers at the level they are now expected to know in sixth grade. We were finishing up a unit on integers, so I scaled back the test to the Common Core requirements. Only problem, the next chapter in the text is on algebra functions, and includes using integer operations (which they struggled with in the prior chapter, and I didn’t test them on). This is requiring me to pick out the problems with integer operations. Just one of the many joys of starting new standards implementation without the curriculum to match.

Planning for the future

As you see in the prior post, I waded into an online kerfuffle about the appropriate texts to use to teach students to think deeply about big ideas. As a result, I’ll be doing my own version of this unit with my students using Esperanza Rising, and the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child. I’ll share how that is going as it comes along.

Looking backwards

I’m also wrapping up our first unit in ELA and content areas. Looking at some of their writing from the week, I’m very pleased with the understandings they’ve come to. Looking back, the Hatchet novel seems to be a good fit for teaching the new ELA standard 5 analyzing text structure. The idiosyncratic dialogue and use of repetition to convey emotion and meaning make an easier entry into this complicated standard. This standard often strikes me as trying to lead students to pointless navel-gazing, but the students themselves have commented unprompted about these text features in our reading, so it makes a natural segue.

Image credit: number 6 by Leo Reynolds, on Flickr