Universal Breakfast

We offer “universal” breakfast this year at our school (a Title One school), Kindergarten eats last.  They begin the breakfast when the bell rings for school to begin.  So, breakfast occurs during “instruction time”.  All other grades pick up their breakfast and take it to their classroom.  Kindergarten gets theirs and eats it in the lunch room.   Prior to this week, the bell would ring to line up at 8:45, and by the time we dumped our backpacks and got across the school to the line we didn’t have to wait much.  They had four lines going for breakfast pickup.  Someone from the district visited and decided that there wasn’t enough accountability with the kids moving through so quickly, so they made the lunch lady cut it down to two lines.  We found that really slowed us down and had us waiting in line for too long so we started doing more things in the room prior to going to the lunch room.  After some trial and error, we found that if we waited 10 minutes before leaving the room, we wouldn’t have to wait in line so long.  But now, instead of getting back to the room around a quarter after, we get back to the room 30 to 40 minutes after 9:00.

We were losing maybe 25 minutes of instruction, now we are losing 40-45 minutes.  Of course they do expect us to somehow teach the same amount in a day…………..

Winter Break

I’m right in the middle of our winter break, and I must say, it’s nice to not have to get up and go to school.  This year has not been fun, or nearly as fulfilling as teaching has normally been for me.  Generally, I love the kids and my job.  But between the effects of the slow economy and the “reform” that’s being pushed down, the job is changing and I don’t think in a good way.  More kids, less help.  Always more testing, like that will somehow fix everything.  I said that I wanted to keep track this year of just how much time is taken away from actual instruction by all of the testing.  In kindergarten there are few tests that can be given whole group, or even in small groups for that matter.  Most of what I need to evaluate needs to be done one-on-one.  So any test, is going to take away from instruction time.

The main test we have to give is aligned to the Common Core State Standards and is given this year four times in kindergarten, and three times in each of the other grades.  We have to give it at the beginning of the year in kindergarten because they want a base line.  Ultimately this is leading up to individual teacher accountability.  In theory.  Other grades have previous year data to compare to.  Kinder does not.   We have been in school now for about 75 days. Administering the test along with Dibels, and mClass Math, took about five weeks at the beginning and at the end of the first marking period the CCSS test took about two and a half weeks.  So in 15 weeks of instruction, I’ve tested for about half of the time.  In January, we do Dibels again and start progress monitoring.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we had aides, or even some help with substitutes while we tested, but the economy has cut out any funding that might have paid for the help.  I could get so much more done with my class if I didn’t have to spend so much time testing.  They didn’t add the testing time onto our time, they took it away from instruction time.

Common Core

It’s all Common Core now.  Just 4 years ago, we were monitored to make sure that we were teaching our math and Language Arts material with “fidelity”.  Basically we had to follow the teacher’s guide exactly and parrot everything.  This year, it’s “teach the standards, use the commercial programs as resources”….  I’ve finally got my head around this with math.  The enVisions (Pearson) math program that we are using has been really frustrating to follow.  Now, with the Common Core mandated, I can justify moving away from the enVisions, and focusing more on depth of knowledge aligned to the Common Core.  I  use more outside resources.  Common Core in kindergarten seems to focus much more on number sense and manipulating number than enVisions.

There have been some significant changes in what we teach.  We don’t really teach time, money, calendar, and patterns much in kindergarten now.  At least not with nearly the emphasis we formerly did.  But they have to know much more about the topics that we DO teach.  Counting for example goes from counting to 20 to counting to 100.

The Common Core in math starts with 8 basic standards. These standards each start out with, “a mathematically proficient student will….”

•  Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.
•  Reason abstractly and quantitatively.
•  Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others.
•  Model with mathematics.
•  Use appropriate tools strategically.
•  Attend to precision.
•  Look for and make use of structure.
•  Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.

The second part of the Standards are the strands by grade level.

Common Core has a deeper emphasis on math discussion and math journals(at least as they want us to teach here), with the students sharing their thought processes.

Class dismissal

Usually I  dismiss the kids from my outside classroom door.  Parents or older siblings come to the room to pick them up.  When I get down to just two or three we go to the front of the school and wait.  Yesterday, I had a couple of late pickups so we were waiting out front.  The two of them got it into their head that they were going to sit on my feet.  I kept moving my feet out-of-the-way at the last minute.  They were laughing and rolling around.  Finally I let them actually sit on my feet.  The little girl sits, leans back against my leg, puts her hands behind her head, looks up at the sun and says, “It’s a beautiful day at the beach.”  and just sits there likes she’s sunning herself.  And she had her shades on.

The first five weeks of testing

Yeah, five weeks.

I hope to be done by Friday.

Dibels, mClass Math, and Common Core State Standard baseline testing.  All of which is done basically one child at a time.  And they are all given multiple times throughout the year, the CCSS test with the same content, will be given 4 times throughout the year to measure growth (and whether or not the teacher is a good teacher…….)

Besides duplicating much of the same stuff in each of the tests, the CCSS test is particularly difficult for them because it basically is meant to show end of year objectives.  So we are basically testing at the very beginning, what they should know at the end.

For the ELA portion, we test letters, upper and lower case, and sounds (78 items).

We test recognizing rhyming words (5 items), producing rhyming words (5 items),  segmenting syllables (5 items), blending onset/rime (5 items), initial sounds (5 items), medial vowel sounds (5 items), and final sounds (5 items)

Then there are 100 sight words

Reading comprehension – read a short passage and then ask 5 questions about major events. Read a short passage and then ask 5 questions about key details.

For the first trimester they have to write an informative passage about their families with the pretest now and the post test on the same topic at the end of the trimester.

There is a 4 part rubric to grade the writing sample on.

To get a 4 on the rubric and be rated as exceeding the standard their passage must

• Provide a clear topic (name what a student is writing about)
• Include 4 or more supporting ideas (supply information about the topic)
• Include a closing

To get a 3 or to meet the standard

• Provide a clear topic (name what a student is writing about)
• Includes 2 or 3 supporting details
• includes a reaction
• uses a combination of drawing, dictating and writing)

To get a 2 and be approaching the standard

• Provides a topic (names what the student is writing about)
• attempts to write words: drawing is easily recognizable

To get a 1 and be rated as Emerging

• off topic
• random words or letters
• unrecognizable drawing

the second trimester writing is for a narrative topic

and the third trimester is for an opinion piece.

Then there’s the math part of the test.

Count to 100 beginning at 0

Count to 100 by 10s beginning at 0

Write numerals 0-20

count 10 different groups of objects and write the number to represent the number of objects (0-20)

compare 5 sets of numbers, identifying the greater, lesser and equal numbers.

5 addition or subtraction to 10 story problems students are to draw the story problem and write the number sentence,students may use manitpulatives.   Credit is given for either the accurate drawing or number sentence.

Name 8 shapes, 4 of them 3 D.

Show understanding of 8 position words by moving an object to the correct location, behind, under, over , on, beside, etc.

Five weeks of testing, and very little direct instruction.

And they are having a hard time transitioning to regular instruction.  Because we haven’t been doing any of that since school started…………..When do we teach?

Common Core State Standards

There is full implementation of the CCSS in K, 1st, and 2nd in our district this year, rolling them out to the rest of the grade levels over the next several years.   We are also moving away from the standard measurement of NCLB and adopting a growth model.  The growth model requires pre-testing, and trimester testing on the standards, that’s 4 times during the year.  We also are being required to do Dibels testing, mClass Math testing and the Renaissance Learning STAR test (in kindergarten we will do the STAR Early Literacy test)  3 or 4 times for the benchmark testing and periodically for progress monitoring.  Then there are ELA unit tests, and Envisions Math unit tests, etc, etc.  There are 8 pages to the CCSS ELA test, and 4 pages to the CCSS Math test. Almost all of these assessments need to be given either individually, or in small groups.  It is just mind-boggling how much time this is going to take.  And as it stands right now, we should top out around 30 students in each of our kindergarten classes.

I want to log just how much time is lost from direct instruction this year due to assessments.  They keep adding new assessments, but don’t take any away.

Back to School the first OFFICIAL day- staff development

Our official work day starts at 8:15.

The agenda for the day (given out at 8:30)

8:15 – Breakfast in the Lounge (who knew) since we didn’t, a second breakfast………

8:30 – Introductions in the Library  (one new teacher)

9:00 – Criterion Referenced Test Results (grades 3, 4 and 5 last year) twiddle thumbs…….

9:30 – Teacher Handbook and Mandatory Videos (Handbook, page by page, Videos, not the actual videos, just talking about the videos)

10:00 – Opening procedures : Office/Universal Breakfast/review of all papers in the teacher packet  (every child gets free breakfast this year at our school-during instruction time -  we discussed it and discussed it, then discussed it some more, but who knows how it will work, we have never done it…)

Picture this, kindergarten, the first day of school,  lets go to the MP room and eat breakfast……….  Four classes of them, we don’t recognize our kids yet, they can’t walk in line.  They know NO procedures for ANYTHING……..

11:30-12:00  Lunch

12:00 – Work in grade levels on specified agenda (don’t think it was really specified)

3:26 – End of contract day

Mind numbing.  Just mind numbing.

Back to School 3

Well, with 23 kids, 11 boys and 12 girls, and 7 days until school starts,  my class is 100% Hispanic.  I don’t think I’ve ever had that before, some of them appear to have one parent who is other than Hispanic, but their ethnicity is listed as such.

Back To School -Two

How many of you teachers, go back to school early, or put in extra time (that you don’t get paid for) before school starts so that on that first day, everything is ready for your new class?  You want the room to look its best, and everything to be perfect for the kids.  Sometimes after you have taught for a few years, maybe you let go a little on the “perfect” part, but I don’t know any teachers who don’t put in some time to get ready for the new year.

There are a number of things that I like to get ready for the kids that I need a class list for.  But for most of my teaching career, I have had to wait almost until the first day to get the list.  We have three days we report to school for before the kids come back and those three days are chock full of meetings and training.  There is very little time for our rooms.  The parents and kids know who their teacher will be in early August, but for some reason,  the teachers were the last to know.  When I was the school technology specialist a few years ago, I actually got in trouble for accessing the lists and printing some of them out for teachers.  It backfired on them of course, when they took away my network rights to the program that allowed me access, I told them they could have ALL my extra rights.  I was a full-time kindergarten teacher at the time and only doing the technology on the side.  It didn’t make me sad to devote all my time to my class and give up the technology, but they were surprised.  I don’t know why…….

This year, we have a district website, that we can login to using our district email login and access our students, it has their addresses, phone numbers ELL (english language learner) status and lots more.  For upper grades there is even testing data from the previous year, although in kindergarten we don’t get that.  It’s a big change and makes so much more sense.  Now I can do their name tags, homework folders, etc.

The start of school

In our district, the teachers report back on August 24th, the students on the 29th of August.  Our principal emailed at the first of August when the office got back,  that  they didn’t want us back until tomorrow, so we wouldn’t get in the way of the custodial “deep cleaning”.    Apparently there  is some funding to pay us hourly money if we want to come in a few days early and work on Common Core State Standards.  We are going to do that as a grade level (conditional on everybody getting a time that we can do it).  The beginning of the year is always stressful, but this year will be more so than some.  Our school was listed in the paper as being one of the schools in the district that has never met AYP.  Most teachers understand how flawed No Child Left Behind is.  But that doesn’t prevent the stress.  It seems to me and I think most educators who have ever worked in at-risk schools, that most of the things that have been put in place and are being put in place to “fix” education, will not fix education, and much of it will make things worse.  You can’t fix a problem by treating the symptoms.  And most teachers aren’t the problem anyway.

I went to some of the big department stores that typically give good sales on school supplies.  The deals are still good, but things have gone up  It is especially apparent when you are trying to get supplies for 30 kids, not just one or two.  In the past I have usually purchased about a gross of the smaller glue sticks, about 40 folders for homework, and about 40 of the 24 packs of crayons.  The crayons and the glue sticks have been 20 cents a package, this year they are 40 cents.  And I can’t find the folders I usually use for under about a dollar a piece.  I’ve decided I can’t afford to spend that much on supplies this year.

I usually send home homework once a week on Monday to be returned on Friday.  It usually consists of a Weekly Reader, and a free book from Scholastic, a little math review and their current letters and sight words and a reading log.  They are expected to read with a family member for 20 minutes a day.

We give each family a list at registration, of suggested supplies for the classroom.  Paper towels, facial tissue, some liquid soap.  It’s not mandatory, but it helps.  I also give them a list of acceptable snacks that can be donated to the classroom for snack time.  No donations, no snacks.  That’s not strictly true, but since the school doesn’t provide snacks, if the parents don’t, then I have too, and in the past that has been a significant expense.

The economy continues to hard here, the school is cutting many things, the parents are in a bad way financially, and teachers can’t keep taking up the slack out of their own pockets. I haven’t worried too much about what I spend on my class in the past, because if I wanted to teach a certain way, then I would provide the materials to do so if the school wouldn’t.  But this year, it seems that my discretionary money has finally shrunk to the point that I am making a conscious effort to cut back  on the spending.