The Moon

My son posted this image of the Moon and Venus from yesterday.  His three year old was arguing with her older sister (12) about whether or not the solar system had 8 or 9 planets.  The three year old maintained that people had decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet so there were 8 planets not 9.  I want her in my class.  Well, maybe not.  She would probably be correcting me all the time.

Speaking of the Moon, one of my kids mooned the class on Wednesday, so she has been taking a little break from school……..  It’s been peaceful and nice the last few days……….

A Twenty…….

We have a weekly school wide writing prompt.  All classes are supposed to participate.  Naturally the product generated in Kindergarten will be somewhat different than that generated in 5th grade (one would hope).  For my kindergarten kids to do it, most of the basic prompt is copied directly from either the board, or a handout.  Each week, one sample is submitted from each class and posted on the walls in the school.  I would have selected this one, but this kid has been selected a couple of times recently, once just last week.  Last week the writing prompt was “If I were President, I would……..”  This same kid in one draft wrote.  “If I were President, I would lower taxes.”  His second sentence was, “If I were President, I would give more money to the schools.”   I wish I knew who he was listening to, and I wonder if they know he is listening that well……….

Anyway, this one just cracked me up, from the picture right down to the way he said his best present was “a twenty”.  Not $20.00, or twenty dollars, but “a twenty”.

Nacho Party

So a couple of weeks ago I created a prize package for my kids.  I wanted something motivational going on that would be kind of fun for the kids.  I told them I would place a colored marker star on the white board every time they did good in specials (art, music, P.E. Library), or if they won for best behaved class in the lunch room, or any other thing where they got recognized for good behavior within the school.  I told them that when they got 10 stars, they could have a nacho party.  Things were going kind of slow for a week or so.  They only picked up 5 stars in two weeks and I was beginning to worry that it was taking too long for them to win.  For young children having the reward out there too far for too long  sort of defeats the purpose.

But today they blew the top off the reward.  At the monthly schoolwide awards assembly they were recognized for two things, they had the highest percentage of attendance on the grade level, and the Specialists collectively recognized them as the overall best behaved class in the school.  Then at lunch they were selected as the best behaved class for the day.  They got a “5″ (best number of points) at Music and they had a sub for the day while I did Mid-Year Benchmark DIBELS testing.  I told them that if the sub gave them a “5″ I would give them a star.  They ended up with 5 stars for the day and got to 10,overall  so now I have to do the whole Nacho Party thing with them.  They were pretty stoked.

Sick Kids

I had 5 out of 26 kids out sick today, and sent one home mid-day with 102.4 fever that was climbing.   I’m constantly amazed that parents can send kids off to school with NO current contact info.  Not one of the phone numbers worked for this child.  They had to send a truant officer out to the house to find the mom.  I have worked in at-risk schools my entire career and the fact that parents can’t seem to keep an active phone number is no surprise, but there has to be SOME way that the school can reach you in an emergency.

Even the nurse can’t medicate, so nothing to break or control a fever except fluids and cool compresses on the head.  It took almost two hours for mom to pick her up and her fever got to at least 102.7.

Teaching and Assessments

In our district, we do a series of tests three times a year, at the beginning, the middle and again at the end.  These tests are supposed to be aligned with the state standards and the stated purpose of the tests is help drive instruction (whatever THAT is supposed to mean, I mean it SOUNDS nice, but reality has a funny way of poking its face into things….).  The district has these testing windows on the master calendar for different tests and you are supposed to give the appropriate tests sometime within the window.  The mid year window opened on February 4th.  It ends this Friday (as in tomorrow).  SOMEBODY decided to hold the tests until yesterday and give us three days to complete them.  Fine.

Yesterday before school, the AP got on the intercom and announced that she was opening the testing closet to check out tests, and when we got there, we were told to never-mind what we were previously told, we had yesterday and today to finish the tests, NOT THREE DAYS as previously explained.  Kinder and 1st Grade generously had until the end of the day today to turn ours in, after all, we needed a little extra time since we had to transfer all of the children’s scores to the scantrons since they marked their answers directly in the testing booklets, oh, and on the language arts part, grade them all on the different rubrics first so that they could be put on the scantron sheets.  2nd Grade and up were supposed to have them turned in by noon since the kids did their own scantron sheets.  I did NOTHING but test for the last two days, no language arts, no math, no social studies, no health, no small group interventions.  Instead, I tested 5-7 kids at a time while the rest of them did a mountain of worksheets (which at the end of the day today, I tossed in the trash on my way out the door).  Of course, now I’m two days off on my pacing calendars for Language Arts and Math…………  (oh yeah, they goofed up the math pacing calendar and didn’t align it correctly with the tests, so some of the material on the tests either hasn’t been covered yet, or was covered a LONG time ago, if we did the built-in-to-the – program  spiral review, that wouldn’t be so bad, but somebody decided we needed to skip around in the new math program and teach the material in a different order, so you can’t do the provided spiral review because frequently the spiral review covers stuff you haven’t taught yet………..)

Then there’s the actual tests.

I mean, who writes these things?  For example, on the Language Arts part of the test, there is a page with a pictograph (never mind that we haven’t done graphing yet, even in math and kindergarten kids always have trouble with graphs anyway).  One of the things they wanted the kids to do was to circle the title of the graph.  First, they can’t READ it, and second the title of the graph wasn’t the only part of the graph with words they couldn’t read, third,  the only context we have ever talked about titles has been with books, as in, “Where is the title of this book?”  “Where does it say who the author and illustrator are?”

On the math part, they were asking about ordinal numbers and they had pictures of objects in line and the kids were supposed to identify the first, second and third things in line.  But instead of just circling the objects, they had to find the corresponding object labelled a, b, c, and d below the picture and circle the answer there.  The answers below were not in the same order, and some of the kids were marking, the first, second or third answer  choice even though it didn’t match the corresponding location in the illustration.  Kindergarten kids are literal that way.

Maybe with all the budget cuts and difficult times ahead, they’ll put SOME people back in the classroom(not that that would necessarily be a good thing).  You know, the ones sitting at desks somewhere that think all this stuff up…………

Naw, that would make too much sense.

My Kids Are Weird

We were having a discussion in preparation for writing our class “Morning Message” and we were talking about our favorite foods.  One little boy said his favorite food was………  you guessed it, broccoli.  I said, ” You like broccoli more than ice cream?”  He said, “Yes.”  Now that’s just nuts.   I mean, fine, like broccoli, but as your FAVORITE food?  Then this other little guy raised his hand and I asked him what his favorite food was.  “Meat.”  I asked what kind of meat?  I’m thinking, steak, pork chops, fried chicken, hamburgers, fajitas, ribs…….  He said, “Cows.” 

I don’t know, that just made me laugh.  I explained that normally we called “cow” meat “beef”.  Maybe you had to be there…….