Parent Conference Progress Update

Friday when I should have sent home  parent-teacher conference confirmations, I remembered AFTER the last child had left.  So Monday mornings conference wasn’t confirmed, and one of my Tuesday morning confirmations didn’t get home on Monday, because the child was absent on Monday. Other than that, it has gone pretty well.  If I don’t count those two, out of 15 scheduled conferences, I had 11 of them.  Not bad.

Tomorrow, there isn’t any school for the students.  I have 11 conferences scheduled during the day tomorrow.  I’ll try to  get the rest of them made up or finished on Thursday or Friday.  So far they are going really well.   It’s been nice to be able to talk to so many of the parents and tell them just how great their children are, and how well they are doing.  Putting together the report cards and the material for the conferences made me realize that my class really was doing better than I had previously thought.  There is this small core of about 5 kids who are really struggling, but the rest of them actually are doing pretty well.

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.

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.

Dibels results

We finished doing the end of year DIBELS benchmark tests this week.  All 25 kids benchmarked for the end of the year except two.  One of them should be retained, he is very young and just hasn’t caught up, and the other has missed more than 30 days of school and has been to three schools this year.  Everybody else did very well though.  Even a couple of kids that are a bit shaky when compared to the rest of the class, still reached benchmark.  I remember that from last year.   So many of the kids are so far beyond the benchmarks, that the others don’t look so good in comparison.  When in reality, they have still reached the kindergarten benchmarks for the end of the year.

I’m just really proud of my kids this year so many of them can read so many words now.  They have just done an outstanding job learning.

Graphing with Kindergarteners

OH MY HECK!!!!!!

They are making me freak’n CRAZY.  All  I want them to do is tell me the difference between one number and another (within the context of a graph).  5 Apples, 3 Oranges, “How many MORE apples are there than oranges?”  or “How many fewer oranges are there than apples?”  (My aide says it because I’m trying to compare oranges to apples……)

We have HAMMERED on the key words MORE, FEWER, LESS THAN.  We have matched up and counted how many of anything is left, etc, etc.  We’ve approached every way from Saturday,  the ones that get it, get it, the ones that don’t, I wonder if they ever will…….  I’m pretty convinced that it’s developmental and they won’t get it until they are ready.

None-the-less, it’s on the test.  And the test cometh.

I do not like mClass math, I do not like it, Sam I am……

mClass math is “supposed” to be a math version of Dibels and we do the assessments on the same Palm and upload the data.  Unfortunately it is NOT anything LIKE Dibels and for Kindergarten at least, I think it’s stupid.  At the BEGINNING of the year for example, to be benchmarked in counting, they have to count to some ridiculous number like 80(Steven could count to 2..), never mind the report card only goes up to 20(for the whole year)……  The rest of it is like that as well. I don’t find any useful information, but it is a colossal waste of time.   Hummm, how do I REALLY feel about it……..

Anyway, the 6 or so lowest kids are supposed to be progress monitored every month.  The test we are to use for the monitoring is ADDITION.   We haven’t actually TAUGHT addition yet, nor will we until almost the end of the year.  Lowest kids, concept not yet taught, THAT makes sense.

The math specialist doesn’t really help, she just fires off emails that are all labelled URGENT.  Out of 27 emails, 20 of them were “urgent”.  I put a copy of the book about the little boy who cried wolf too many times in her mail box…..   You can’t talk to her about anything that is bothering you, she takes it all personal and gets defensive.   The new math program is less than stellar(hint: it will be one of my linked categories at the bottom of this post).  Her main answer is to just DO it and stop complaining.   THAT’S helpful.

Someone (probably her) decided that our aides couldn’t do the diagnostic interviews (progress  monitoring) but the classroom teacher has to do it(that way we will understand where the kids are better or something like that, so apparently the score they get doesn’t actually DO that….).   She’s been getting on our cases because we haven’t really done them.  Yesterday she walked through the lounge while the kindergarten teachers were eating, and stopped by one teacher and LOUDLY told her what a good  job she was doing getting it done(funny thing, the aide that did her’s for her later did mine too), while pointedly ignoring the rest of us.  Reminded me of myself a few minutes earlier on the way to the lunchroom with the kids, “I like how Nancy is walking in line…..”

I about gagged.

Out of ALL the cuts they are making next year, apparently she isn’t one of them.  Worst luck……..

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.

Three days back and counting……

Let’s see,  on Monday, one of the first things I heard after almost 5 weeks out, “Mr B.! You got new shoes!”  They don’t remember what an Aa or a Bb is or how they sound, but they DO remember what I wear.  My wife says that’s because they are down there by the shoes………

The next thing they asked was, “What’s that thing on your arm?”  I said that it was for when I go to the gym (without getting too specific,  it’s a BodyBugg, that monitors my caloric burn and activity).  They were divided between the ones that said, “My mom (or dad) does that.” and the ones that said, “What’s a gym?”  I said, “A gym is PE for grownups.”

Now, so far this week, Reading First in my room, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday (she ended up coming into my room EVERY DAY this week, it’s like, WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT?  You may not really like the WAY I do things, but I have the highest scores in the school in kindergarten….so what ever I do, must work……..).  Staff meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday, and two of my three 50 minute preparation times taken for meetings.    During one of the meetings during my preparation time, we went over trimester district testing results and the Reading First lady was there.  Later she was giving me a little grief over how I do some things.  I pointed out that of the 5 kindergarten classes at our school my class scored the highest on that skill…….   Oh yeah, and mClass math assessments on all kids this week and dibels progress monitoring on all kids this week.   Please, just let me TEACH…………

Monday and Tuesday next week I have a sub both days so that I can go to two different trainings.  One of them is supposed to be a two day training (I’ve already done a previous two days of it) and the other one is a one day training that they happened to schedule on Tuesday —AT THE SAME TIME.  Of course they BOTH think they are the most important one for me to go to.      Again, just let me teach…….

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.

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.