Reviewing Reading Skills

Spelling Test

• I had to throw out one of my questions on the test. I turned it into extra credit. I discovered that I did not agree with the proper way to break up the word and most of students did not break up the word according to the dictionary. 

Poster Math

• This problem was a little more straight-forward than I prefer. They had to find the missing side of a pentagon using the perimeter formula. I was surprised when two groups were unable to solve the problem. I had the two girls who were the first to solve the problem help the group. These girls got to clip up for helping the groups. I was surprised that the two groups had trouble. When I designed the groups, I used an excel sheet to put at least one student from every math group (which is broken up by skill level) into each group. The students did fairly well with the project, but I not sure that those two groups understood how to solve the problem, even after other students helped them. The posters can be found on my classroom blog. 

Using the Social Studies book to review Reading Skills

• My teacher helped in the main office today. I unexpectedly was alone in the room when reading time began. I did not think that I would be alone for very long so I tried to begin reading time by getting out the tubs, but the materials had not been switched out and I did not know which students were supposed to go to which stations. Because I believed that the teacher would be back in five minutes, I had the students read the social studies book a few pages at a time. I figured that if needed, reading time and social studies time could be switched later. I also know that reading skills can be used with any text, although some texts work better than others. I decided that I wanted to review and model skills. As a class, we paused to share thoughts, connections, and visualizations. I learned that most of the students do not admit to visualizing what they read. I will have to reteach that skill next week or soon after that. I would love to incorporate music into that lesson. (Visualize what you see while listening to a piece or music and then while listening to a few pages from a book.) After we finished the lesson from the book, I began to review other skills from the anchor charts on the wall to recognize any gaps, but then my teacher returned. Unfortunately, it was during a transition, so the students were a little loud. In the future, I will call my teacher to see if she would like to return for the reading block because I later learned that all I had to do was call her and she would have come up or told me what she wanted me to do with the students. My teacher began a really cool lesson about making inferences. 

Fun Friday

• Some of the students got to go to the computer lab for Fun Friday today. In order to qualify for fun Friday, students must submit all of their work on time and not end a day below ready to learn. There was an aide with five students in the lab that we had reserved. All of their screens looked the same and kind of boring, so I did not want to disturb the students in case they were doing a practice test. In the future, I will tell any teacher that is in a lab that I have reserved that I have the lab reserved. 

Planning

• I get to fully take over planning and teaching for next week. There are a few things that I can't decide how to space out, but I feel pretty good about it.