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!)