What worked and what didn't.

Well, as a "guest teacher" I do not have a classroom of my own to reflect on but as a tutor for the Boys and Girls Club, I can tell you what worked and what did not. 







What worked...

• Fraction Jenga War- You can read about my experience with this game here. This was by far THE most fun I had with these kiddos this year. They were able to see how fractions relate to one another and by the end they were able to really understand how they compare. 
• Board Games-They were learning without actually learning and it was so fun to just play a game or two with them with no specific agenda in mind. 
• "No-Peek"-This card game is a variation on a game called "Golf" that my in-laws love to play. The goal is to get as few points as possible by flipping over cards and replacing higher value cards with lower value cards. There is also the option of taking away entire rows of cards by matching three in a column. This hits those critical thinking skills and by the end I think they understood what they needed to do in order to get fewer and fewer points. 
• The group I had the privilege to work with this year- By the end of this year I came out with a great group of kids. We had to restructure the group after the first 3 months but I wound up with a good group of kids. I hope they had as much fun as I did. 

What didn't work...

• Paperwork-As much as I hate it, paperwork is necessary. It took just as much time to fill out the log as it did to actually do the activity I had planned. This form was created for us and it is a very nice form but I had to fill out one for EVERY STUDENT I HAD! It got to be a lot and at times I forgot to fill it out. 
  
   
• No connection with the student's teachers- This has been a failure on my part not to ask for this information. I did not have information on any of the students I was working with besides their first semester grades. I tried to work with them in the subject areas that were identified by I was not given updates on how they were progressing in class. I did not have any benchmark information to work with. Next year, hopefully I will get better intelligence or at least run my own type of assessment to see where they struggle. 
• Scrabble-I had the brilliant idea to introduce the kids to Scrabble and it was an epic fail. The group I had at the time (I switched kids in and out due to behavior) were not interested and did not really get the rules. These kids are in school until 4:00 pm, so it is a very long day for them so the last thing they want to do was "learn". 

Hope this was helpful! Make sure to see all the other reflection blogs out there!  Click on the above picture to go back to the original link! 

Writing Rant!

“I’ve seen their writing. I’m surprised they could read the test!”

The above quote was taken from a blog post from a fellow teacher-blogger, “The Science Penguin”.

In the post she was lamenting about test scores from this year and her significant other came into the room and made this observation.

Then it hit me, he’s right!

Recently, I subbed for a teacher and she gave her students an assignment. The assignment was to write a simple thank you letter. This letter was supposed to be addressed to their parents to thank them for all they have done for them through school up to this point.

When I gave the assignment, you would have thought I had asked them to write an essay on War and Peace complete with annotated bibliography and visual aids. Now, from 1^st or 2^nd graders I might expect that response because letter writing, while taught, is still unfamiliar task for this age group. But these were not the aforementioned age groups, these were 6^th graders!

I would think by this time in their school careers writing a simple thank you note would not be such a gripe fest. I heard every complaint from, “Do we have to do this?” to “My parents never did anything for me” (which is a sad commentary in itself, but I digress).

 I know kids don’t like to do work, especially if given from a guest teacher, who to them is nothing more than a glorified substitute for their regular babysitter. But this didn’t surprise me, what did however is worthy of note.

As the students were “writing” (and I use the term loosely) I saw an alarming amount of them who simply COULD NOT WRITE! It was shocking, 6^th graders who had no concept of grammar, simple spelling or punctuation. Some could barely manage to come up with coherent complete thoughts.

I know their teachers and I know they are working their butts off to make sure these children are prepared for their next chapter but what from what I saw, there was a disconnect. Testing is a part of this I think, teachers everywhere are being forced to indoctrinate students to get a “6” on their writing prompt. Ask any student anywhere what a “6” paper looks like and they can tell you but can they produce such a product? I have seen some students who write for the sheer pleasure of writing and we love to see that but most see it as drudgery, filling only a couple of lines on the page and putting their pencils down in surrender. Most barely make it that far.

Simple 6 +1, YES MA’AM, and other writing rubrics that have been proliferated throughout schools everywhere are being used to help our children learn to write better and to help organize their ideas but it doesn’t seem to be working.  A lot of these student’s letters that I saw were just a jumble of random thoughts and I believe one even had “text-speak”.  We have writer’s workshop and author’s conferences and have spent tens of thousand of professional development dollars all with the effort to help our students write better. They even added writing to the SAT (which has now been rescinded) because they were finding that student simply did not know how to express their ideas on paper coherently.

So at the end of the day, can this be fixed? I hope that what I saw that day is not indicative of their everyday writing.

Focused instruction could be a key, but what does that look like? It should start in the primary grades.

 I saw a way to start on a blog post from Growing Firsties where she created her own spot-check for her friends, which gives her data (I just love data!) to be able to accurately help her friends learn better writing skills.

I am sure there are many others great teachers who are doing their part to help student appreciate writing. Creating Writer’s Notebooks and giving students the tools to be good writers are just the start. When I was in college learning about this process of the Writer’s Notebook, I would sit in my classes and just “people-watch” and get great ideas for stories.

Let’s put the wonder back into writing! 

(Sorry the post is so long, just a lot on my mind!)

Fraction Jenga War

Yesterday I cruising the "Interwebs" and I came across this post from Math Coach's Corner about working with fractions and making them fun. 

I took a look at the Fraction War and thought, "This would be a great activity to do with my kids at the Boys and Girls Club."  I printed off the fraction cards and was all set and then I found my old Jenga game. 

I thought, "Maybe I could combine the two in some way to make this fun and exciting as well as educational." 

So, I set up the Jenga game as usual and placed the fraction cards in the center of the table. I posted the following on the board: 

Fraction Jenga War

1. Pass out cards to all players.

2. Play a card from your hand without looking.

3. Player with the largest fraction wins. 

4. Winner then picks Jenga piece. 

I picked up the students and explained the rules to them. Immediately, I was met with resistance: "This is going to be boring!", one of them exclaimed. 

I asked them how would they know unless they tried. 

Reluctantly we began to play. They had a blast! 

They were so engaged with the game and learning about fractional relationships! We will revisiting this activity again!  

Thanks to the Math Coach!  

Testing Nonsense!

So this past week I have been in  a school filling in as a "bathroom monitor" with first/second grade boys. (That's a sad commentary in itself!) But the purpose of this post is to talk about another thing that seems to be garnering a lot of focus these days in the realm of education: high-stakes testing!

As a former classroom teacher, I know the drudgery of prepping students for an exam that does nothing more than test how well they can parrot back information that their already overworked teachers have drilled into their heads since Day One.

So in preparation for these high-stakes tests that our states pay hundreds of millions of dollars on, teachers all across the state do all they can to pump up their students with colorful signs with reminders:

"Get a good night's sleep!"

"Eat a good breakfast!"

"Read the question and the answer choices carefully!"

"Go back and check over your work!"

and the list goes on and on. 

But now..we have gone from colorful signs to this...Teachers rapping!

  Now, I am all for grabbing students where they are, but at what cost? 

We also have teachers going to such lengths as flash mobs to popular songs all in an effort to getting students FIRED UP for testing!

What are your thoughts? Are we throwing our professionalism out the window all in an effort to help our students parrot back info that most won't use?

Let me know in the comments below!

100 Starburst Candy Drop

I know it has been awhile since my last post but with a new baby, life gets pretty busy. Here is a reflection on something I did with my tutoring students last Thursday. 

I love Starburst candy chews! I actually came up with an idea to have some fun with my tutoring group using them. 

There was a game show about 4 years ago called, "The Million Dollar Money Drop" hosted by actor and comedian Kevin Pollak. The premise was that two contestants, usually connected in some way, were given $1,000,000 to start the game and were given 7 multiple choice questions. As each round progressed the questions get harder and the choices get less and less. 

For example, Round 1 they are given a question and 4 answer choices. Then in Round 2, they are given a question and 3 possible answers and so forth until the 4th round where they are given a question and only 2 possible answers. For each question, they have to shift their money around to the answer they think is correct or if they are not sure, they can do multiple answers. They have to leave one answer choice empty if they decide to do more than 1 answer. With 4 choices, they can fill 3, 3 they can fill 2 and so on..

Now the fun part, as answers are revealed, if they put money on any incorrect answer, they lost that amount of money. If they lose all their money, the game is over. 

So, I decided to use this concept with the kids that I tutor at the Boys and Girls Club. I got some questions, some Starburst candies and got everything set up. 

I arrived on Thursday and explained the rules and they were eager to get started. They had to work together as a group (there were 4 kids today, usually I have 5) and I counted out 100 Starburst candies and started asking questions. 

I would like to say they got every question correct, but this was not the case but it was fun watching them try to decide on answers and moving all those candies around (good thing they are individually wrapped). 

They lost the whole pile a few times but I gave them second chances on some of the questions and at the end I gave them some Starburst as a consolation prize. I may do this again with them but we will see.