My head hurts……

I have 10 boys and 29 students.   FIVE of my boys are seriously clueless.  One of my babies, can’t count to one.  No clue, not in English, not in Spanish.  I hold up one finger and ask him how much it is, and he holds up one finger.  Uno, dos, what comes next?  No reponse.  Big happy grin.  This is killing me because this is NOTHING to be happy about.  How can you be so clueless that you don’t know you are clueless?  Four of the five are competing for the honor of being crowned King of Cluelessness.  I want to check them for a pulse except they are always rolling around on the floor goofing off.

I have someone who started coming in this week to do interventions with the low kids. (we’ll see how long THAT lasts).  After two days, they are already making her crazy.

Note from our Principal about Halloween next week

Email from the Principal this morning.

“Classes may have their Halloween parties on Friday, October 30th. Some intermediate teachers have elected not to have a party. If you are planning a celebration you may draft your own note home. According to the guidelines, parties are the last 20 minutes of the school day. Students may dress up in their costumes. ONLY kindergarten and 1st grade will parade through the school.  Students may change into their costumes no earlier than 2:45.

There are many academic games you can play during your party with a festive theme. Remember there may be students in your class who will not be able to celebrate Halloween.”

The three kindergarten teachers who will be here next week got together  and decided that if the party was only for 20 minutes, and they can’t get into costumes until 2:45, and we get out at 3:10, we didn’t want to even TRY to do the parade.  As grade level chair, I went to the Principal and told her we didn’t want to do the parade.

1.  SHE thinks the kindergarten kids are “cute” in their costumes.

2. SHE thinks we should do the parade.  She wants to see them.

3. But she isn’t giving us any help. 

Hummm, lets see, 29 kids and one teacher…..  

She said, but you will have lots of parents. 

I said, I had ONE parent last year…..

Oh yeah, and don’t forget the academic games for the 20 minute party.

 

At the end of the day dismissal

At the end of the day, parents gather outside the gate to the kindergarten playground to pick up their kids.  It’s too congested at the gate, so when the bell rings, the gate is unlocked and they come to our rooms or in the case of two of our classes without outside doors, to the hall doors and we release them to the parent or older sibling.  Normally the teacher next door opens her door, takes about three steps and unlocks the gate.  But for the last two weeks and for the next week, her class has been on break.  I have to leave my class in the room, walk down, unlock the gate and then walk back.

At first they were pretty good about sitting there on the floor with their backpacks and waiting for me to get back.  But lately, they have started sneaking over to the door and peeking out.  They think it’s great fun (they are SO scared of me).  The other day I walked out, then quickly turned around and waited by the door, then jumped out and scared them.  The timing was just right, a whole bunch of them were almost to the door and I caught them in mid stride.  All the parents thought that was hilarious.

Today We Started “The Test”

District test, given three times a year at or near the end of each trimester.  They had a big testing meeting yesterday where they give us all of the testing procedures, all the does and don’ts of test giving.   You know, like cover all the alphabets up in the room, and all the numbers.  Yeah, right, they don’t have enough butcher paper at my school.  ALL the tables have alphabets  and numbers to 20 on their individual name tags.  I have maybe 10 alphabets up around the room and about the same for numbers to 20.  I refuse to cover them up.  The kids smart enough to look don’t need to, and the ones who would need to,  are too clueless.   Pages of testing rules and procedures, that we all had to sign off on.  The principal was adamant that we follow all of the procedures as outlined.  One of the 5th grade teachers raised his hand and asked about the help (extra proctors) that was required for classes with over 28 students, (that would be half the school).  Well, no,  there would be no extra proctor help,  we would just have to make do.

Funny how rules and procedures can be so situational…….. for some people.

I hate taking time away from teaching to do all of the testing.  When you mess up the routine for several days like this, it takes DAYS to get the routine back.  I also hate watching normally smart kids picking the wrong answers on the tests too.  The only consolation is that half of the low kids get lucky on their guesses to sort of balance it out.

On one of the math pages, they had to pick the one out of four pictures that did not fit the set.  Three cakes and a fish.  They pick the cake they like.  Wonderful.  Three flowers and a bear, they choose one of the flowers.  A marker, a crayon, a pencil and a cat,  they choose the pencil.    Go figure.

Today was a Marvelous Day…… or something….

At my year round school we have 5 rotation groups, one being out on break at any given time.  A week and a half ago, they made staffing adjustments based on the annual “count day” and we lost three teachers at our school.  So they moved teachers and kids around to adjust everything and one of the things that did was mess up our preparation times this rotation segment.   I normally have my prep time from 1:25 to 2:15 every day.  But one day this rotation, they scheduled us in the morning during second hour.  And of course it would have to be Friday.  The first time, I forgot and was almost 15 minutes late.  Today, I remembered before school started and set an electronic timer to go off a few minutes before.  That went well.  But it really makes for a LOOONNNGGG afternoon.  And it’s Friday afternoon……..

Today went pretty good though.  I dumped the book we were supposed to read in Language Arts, (it was the THIRD of four times we are supposed to read it, and it isn’t good enough for four times.  Our unit theme works around the kitchen and cooking, and one of the books we have done is “Hold the Anchovies”, a pretty good book on pizza.  We’ve talked about recipes, where the ingredients come from, etc.  So I decided to read “The Little Red Hen” to them, and I made it a project.  I have puppets for the parts, I have a big book, I also brought in some wheat, still in it’s stalks.  We took a head or two of the wheat apart and I showed them how to get the kernels of wheat out and discard the chaff.  Then I had some bulk wheat that had already been cleaned and we ground some of it in a hand grinder.  I also brought in homemade bread, jelly and honey and they all got to eat a piece.  In the past I used to bring in bread machines and bake the bread right in the room, but I don’t have the bread machines anymore. 

For the last month or so, I’ve baked all of our bread.  I’ve decided that I like baking my bread in the oven,  instead of the bread machines. I have more control over how it comes out.   I can make whole wheat bread that is really a nice texture, not like the heavy stuff I remember from when I was a kid.

Anyway, the afternoon went pretty fast with the activities and we ended up with a surprise ending to the day when a mom showed up with cupcakes and juice for her daughters birthday (it was only a surprise because I had forgotten that she was doing it).

Math……..

I gave the kids (29 of them) our Unit 5  test.  I spread them around the room with lap boards and gave them the test.  Unit 5 is numbers 6-10.  We are 7 weeks into the school year, we’ve now covered extensively 0-10, our district trimester exams are next week, and if this test was any indication of what’s to come, we are in trouble.   Twelve of my kids totally BOMBED the test.  I did it whole group because I don’t currently have any help in the room and if I’m doing small group, I have to have something for the rest of them to do while I do the small groups.  After they were done, I looked at all the test booklets, put a math video on for the rest of the kids and called kids over who had problem tests or test questions.

In the process of checking their answers, and asking questions,  I found out that a whole bunch of them couldn’t even do one-to-one correspondence.  Some have little to no number recognition, and a couple can’t count to 3.  How is that possible?  Three.   Some of them couldn’t do it in either English OR Spanish.

I have gotten to know and love my kids this year but, this class is NOT my class from last year.  The first grade teachers have told us repeatedly that they have been impressed with the batch of first graders that we gave them.  This year the kids seem more immature, not as ready for school, and we don’t have the support we had last year to help them.  We didn’t make AYP last year and a decision seems to have been made to put all of the focus onto 3rd, 4th and 5th grade to try to hit AYP this year.  So we aren’t getting the  aide-help we got last year, they pulled our aides to work with the older kids. 

I don’t know, it’s just really frustrating when the expectations just seem to get higher and higher, and we are supposed to do it on less and less.  I don’t know a single teacher at our school who doesn’t appear overwhelmed this year.

Art Today

How do you convince the specialists that they shouldn’t send kindergarteners to the bathroom by themselves?  Today while my kids were in art, one of the teachers brought one of my students to me that she had found crying in the hall.  The little girl has been in my class (and our school) for less than a week.  You can get lost in our newer  ”indoor” schools until you learn your way around and this little girl had gone to the bathroom and couldn’t find her way back, either to Art or to our room.  She was sobbing uncontrollably.  I walked her back to the Art room and suggested to the Art teacher (for the second time) that she shouldn’t let kindergarteners out alone – especially new ones…..

Ants

We have had an ant problem.  I have put in two requests for spraying.  When they started dropping on us from the drop ceiling I decided it was too much.  I invited the custodian down to watch them crawling around in the light fixture.  He allowed that I really did have a problem, but couldn’t say when the district might get around to doing something.  He said that I “could” put out ant bait for them.  So I bought about a dozen of them.  I put a bunch up in the ceiling, and  all along the wall by the outside door where the nest is, just outside.

Since even when they do vacuum, they don’t do a “real” good job, I have about a 6-8 foot section of wall now with the little carcasses piled up like this………

Next Week is a Four Day Week…….. for the kids.

Teachers on the other hand, have to show up on Monday, at the usual time and be bored to tears all day.  At 2:09 today, they sent out an email that said this:

On Monday we will have an all day training on Personal Narrative in the library from 8:30 – 3:16.  Please bring your Write Tools Binder. It is requested that you bring 2 sets of student samples if you have them available as we would like to quickly review writing strategies we used last year. Also, please check and let me know if you need a personal narrative insert for your Write Tools Binder.

At 2:09….. and school gets out at 3:10.

One of my favorite sayings is, “A failure to prepare on YOUR part, does not constitute an emergency on MY part.”  Heck, they knew we would be doing staff development  last spring.

And I just have oodles of  FINE examples of Narrative Writing from my kindergarteners that have been in school now for lets see…….TWENTY EIGHT days.  Some of them can even write their names.  Wanna bet, they don’t have anything else planned for the kinder and even the first grade teachers?  What a stinking waste of time Monday is going to be…….