Dibels Problems, (not specifically Dibels fault)

These are my DIBELS scores from the 4th day of school.  Look pretty good don’t they.  The biggest problem was that it was the 4th day of school.  The second biggest problem is that my school wanted me to use these scores to drive instruction.  They gave me a break too.  They said I didn’t have to progress monitor the strategic or benchmark kids until January.  So basically, the Intensive kids are the focus……..  Only one problem with that.  My TRUE intensive kids aren’t really in the intensive group as based on these scores.  Only one of them is, the second one down.  This child is a non-English speaking Hispanic child and consistently scores low.

FOUR other intensive kids are down in the middle of the strategic group.  How did they get there?  They made some good guesses or got lucky on maybe one or two questions on the Initial Sound Fluency test.  That test has 16 questions that go something like this.  (looking at 4 pictures ) Pointing to each one, “These are star, flower, letters, and goat.  Which one begins with /g/? “  Three like that and one like this, “What sound does flowers begin with?”  This assessment is timed, and scored based on a formula that uses the amount of time and the number of correct responses to arrive at a score.  Shorter time = higher score.  I had one little boy who would point to ANY picture just as soon as you finished asking (which stops the clock until the next question)  but had NO IDEA about sound/word relationships.  He STILL has no phonemic awareness. Interestingly, almost all of the kids that scored zeros on the Letter Naming Fluency are my true Intensive kids.  But ONE test is not a reliable indicator.  The bottom kid in the intensive group (the one with 2 zeros) has benchmarked on his ISF and knows almost all of his letters, upper and lower case and almost all of his sounds.

I LIKE DIBELS,  I just think it’s not being used correctly at my school.  As a teacher, I need to be able to adjust my groups based on ON GOING assessments.  Subsequent  progress monitoring, not required by the school, but done by me, supports my assessment of the ability levels of these kids.  But my school and my district continue to ask about and require specific interventions for the original 4 kids, not the group that REALLY needs it.  I was told that I couldn’t adjust my groups, at least not that bottom one.

Christmas Vacation and our rotation break. No school until Jan. 26!

Sure, to be politically correct, it would be “Winter Break”, but for me, it’s Christmas Break.   And then our rotation goes on one of our scheduled three breaks during the year.  We had our first one before school even started, this is our second one.  Our last one comes right after spring break I think.  Then it’s one LONG haul until the end of the year, not many holidays in there either.  But the kids will have a nice long stretch before they go to first grade to get ready.

Anyway, all that to say that I might not be posting here much until late January when the kids give me something to talk about again.

Clueless Kids

Today the day started out as usual.  Accept for the kid that brought dog poop into the class on the bottom of her shoe.  Since I had to clean that off, I sent everyone to their tables to start instead of gathering on the carpet.  Got the shoe and the sink cleaned up, got the calendar out of the way and the the morning message, then got into our lesson on the carpet.  About half way through, kids started wanting drinks.  The only things I allow kids to leave group for are the bathroom, and to get a kleenex or blow their nose.  So the answer was NO.

When we are done with carpet work, and before moving to the tables, I have them go outside, run out across the grass and around the tree, come back and hop the hop scotch squares, run the long (and it is long) wiggly line on the asphalt, go around the big Fox and Hound circle, then climb onto the monkey bars on one of two ways that require climbing, and slide down the slide.  When they get to the bottom of the slide they hop up one class line  on one foot and back down the other one on the other foot, THEN they can go get a drink.  This wakes up the sleepy ones and gets the wiggles out of the rest.

So today, we FINALLY reached that point in the lesson and I told them to go run.  Three quarters of the class was out and to the tree before someone told me that it was RAINING outside.  So after yelling at them until I was ready to scream, I finally got them all back in the room.  They were quite dissapointed.  Never mind that it was maybe 40 degrees out there.  And wet.  So we gathered back on the carpet and we did exercises there.  I am so out of shape.  We ran in place for a minute.  I think it was one of the longest minutes in my life.  Then we did jumping jacks.  Oh Joy.  Inclement weather schedule was called, I couldn’t find my schedule, so I had my aide go next door to find out what time lunch was.  She came back and said nobody was there.  So at least we knew what time lunch was.  We were only 5 minutes late.  I blamed the kids.

End of the day, still wet and rainy, had to fight the little munchkins to put their coats on…….  hence the title of the post.

The most disruptive student in my class……

It was really amazing today.  At 3:00, ten minutes before dismissal, I realized that I hadn’t had a single child pull a card for discipline.  Not one single child.  Nobody.

Curious how having one student absent can change the whole day.

Progressive Discipline

I have used a colored card system in the past, where for every infraction, the student moved a card, with each card resulting in a progressively more severe response.  Last year the cards were getting old, and I was getting tired of them, so I got rid of them.  I had a really good class last year and we got by with an occasional trip to timeout as the only real consequence in the class.  A couple of times kids did things that resulted in a visit with an administrator, but those things usually fell outside of that would normally be handled in a classroom setting anyway.

This year, I started out that way again, but with this mix of kids it just hasn’t worked.  I have a little cluster who could spend all day in timeout and couldn’t care less.  So I have adapted and re-instituted the card system as described in the second paragraph below. Over the last two years I have come up with the following class rules which I really like.  They aren’t so much rules as guiding principles about how we will treat each other in our class. They are framed  around the rights of the individuals in class.

Class rules and expectations:

Everyone has a right to learn, no one has the right to interrupt or waste our time.

Everyone has a right to hear and be heard. No one has the right to keep us from being heard when it is our turn.

Everyone has a right to be safe, and have their belongings be safe. No one has the right to make us feel afraid, or to damage or take our belongings.

Everyone has the right to be themselves. No one has the right to laugh at us, to intentionally hurt us, or our feelings.

Discipline Plan

Students have a magnetic picture/name card on the white board. Their card is moved when an infraction occurs. Cards are reset daily. For normal infractions, their cards move one category. The first move is a Warning, the second move results in a Timeout. A third move results in a Loss of Lunch Recess (if before lunch, that day, if after lunch the next day) The fourth move results in a Call or Note Home (a note must be signed by a parent/guardian and returned). Anything beyond is a trip to the office. Some infractions, such as fighting may result in direct serious consequences (such as a call home or a trip to the office) regardless of where they start.  On Fridays, students who have not moved past a warning during the week will be rewarded for their efforts either with an extra recess, or a treat.

I think it’s a perfectly reasonable plan.  The administration feels differently.  I can’t have the fifth consequence apparently.  They don’t want us to send them our kids, because, they would have too many kids in the office…………

A little while after making me remove the Visit to the Office as a consequence, the vice principal came into my room and asked to borrow my overhead for a training.  I said sure, if I could still send kids to the office.   I’m an impertinent kind of guy.  But realistic.  I quickly told her I was just kidding and certainly she could use the overhead.   When it gets right down to it, you really don’t want get on their bad side………

We have an Elmo at our school that I discovered has just been sitting in a closet, so I commandeered it.  I figured how hard can it be to use one of these things, Right?  I mean, I’ve seen someone use one before.  So the other day I got it out during math and was trying to set it up, it was going OK, but was taking a couple of minutes to get the cables connected and so this one little darling in my class, said, “Mr. B. you are breaking rule number 1.”  I was busy connecting things and I said, “Huh?” and he said, “You know, nobody has the right to waste our time…..?”

I hate smarty kids.

Reading First, Again……..

Since I got used to having people in my room while I’m teaching ALL of the time (well, that’s what it feels like anyway…)  I’ve actually started to enjoy part of it.  The on-site Reading First person has been spending some time with me and we have been working on some of the strategies that involve more of the class than things like just calling on one kid at a time for a response.  We used Kagan Cooperative Learning Structures at my last school, but a lot of the stuff they were focusing on at the time was hard to bring down to  the kindergarten level.  Three that are working with my kids as they get used to them are: Choral response, Action Response (like thumbs up or thumbs down) and Partner response (think, pair, share).  In Partner response you can do it different ways to engage both learners, A tells B,  B tells A,  A and B tell each other, and the beauty is that you can then ask A to tell you what B said.  If they don’t know whose response you are going to ask for, they both have to be ready.  The idea is to get many more kids engaged rather than just the one you call on.  Something else I’m doing better is picking up the pace.  On the phonemic awareness and phonics parts of the lesson, if they don’t know it, I just tell them and move on.  For example today they were having a hard time identifying the rhymes in some text.  Rather than spend a lot of time trying to get someone to give me the correct response,  I deliberately emphasized the rhyming words, then if they didn’t get it  quickly, I just told them and moved on.  I’m also doing more chorale response activities, like having them repeat the two rhyming words several times.

This isn’t a big deal in the sense that I’m giving them the answers, because all of the phonemic awareness stuff and phonics stuff spirals in our reading program.  Sooner or later they will get it.  I really noticed this last year towards the end of the year when we got into consonant blends, digraphs, double vowels, and silent e words.  At first, they weren’t getting a lot of it, but the more they did it, the more of them started to get it.  But they had to work with the things for a certain amount of time before it clicked.

Anyway, I decided that I’m going to video myself a number of times so that I can see what it looks like.  Oh joy.