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.

If you have six cookies and there are three kids………

Apparently since school is out for the majority of the district (and that’s another whole pet peeve), someone has too much free time.  They have put a filter block on blogs.  I can’t get to my school blog from school anymore.  Oddly, I can still access blogs to read through Google Reader, I just can’t go directly to the blogs proper, and I can’t post.  I guess it’s no surprise, I was a little surprised I could l get to them in the first place.

Today we were doing math and I was trying to get the kids to figure out how to divide up a bunch of Unifix  Cubes into equal piles.  Getting them to problem solve is like pulling teeth.  Actually, I think I’d RATHER pull teeth.  After working at it on the rug for about 45 minutes, and still dealing with a lot of glazed over eyes, I put my head down on the floor and said, “I want my Momma, I think I’m going to cry.”  My new kid (the one driving me crazy) said, “Mr. B’s not going to cry, he’s a MAN.”   Then he nudged me (I had my face down in my hands), “Come on Mr. B. – MAN UP -  be a MAN.”

Where do they get this stuff?

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.

The New Room

OK, now I’m getting excited. Yesterday I went by my new school and got my room assignment. I went by the room and took some pictures so that I could begin planning the layout. I won’t actually be able to get into it for a few more days yet. What is SO cool about it is that it was actually made as a kindergarten classroom. At my old school, in the 18 years I was there, the kindergarten rooms were never used for kindergarten. In one of the rooms there was a long entrenched preK program. And the other room was used for special ed early childhood programs.

The room has two bathrooms, two storage closets, two sinks, four bulletin boards and two white dry erase boards. I should have three Waterford computers and three classroom networked computers. Our school programs are, for Reading, Trophies by Harcourt, supplemented by Reading First, Voyager Learning (we get handhelds for scoring and administering the Dibels tests), and Waterford; our math program is enVision Math by Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley (new this year).

Thursday, November 8, 2007

It’s the end of the grading period…

I have spent DAYS doing one on one assessments on my kinder kids to find out what they have learned. In kindergarten here, report cards are more – what do they know rather than grades on assignments. Do they know the uppercase letters, the lower case, the sounds, can they write the letters? Can they count to 20, recognise numbers to 10 and write numbers to 10? Some surprises. Kids that “appeared” to know more than they do and some that know more than I thought they did.

Then there is the “interim” tests, given three times a year. Last year I tested 3 kids at a time and the rest of the kids did seat work.I decided with all of this that instead of dragging it out over a week or two, to do it fast, and get back to our regular instructional day as soon as possible. The extended disruption of dragging it out off sets any small gains I might get by testing in smaller groups. They just can’t handle the lack of supervision, while I’m tied up testing. So we tested whole group today and got all of the Language Arts portion done, I’ll do math tomorrow, then just a little time to make up absent kids and any missed or messed up pages. The scores won’t be quite as good, but the routine won’t be messed up too bad either.

On another note, I’m taking the kids down the hall to dismiss them and as I approach, this mother is looking at her daughter and just starts to LAUGH, she had dressed her all up pretty in a dress and white tights. The tights where now a dirty brown with holes in the knees. She sputters, “What happened?” I said, “Two things, PE and recess.”

Thursday, September 13, 2007

I make them wash their hands, really I do….

It’s a new school year and I have a bunch of new kids. So the whole sanitation thing is a wash and we are starting from scratch. We have talked about it, we have demonstrated, we have lots of soap, hand sanitizer, paper towels, etc. We have talked about how to sneeze and cough to reduce exposure and we have talked about where to puke (in the garbage).

It doesn’t do any good.

(part of this is really out of their control, it is a simple fact of going from a limited exposure atmosphere at home to a school setting with lots of kids and “new” germs)

The first week, I had almost 100% attendance, and it’s gone down hill from there. I have 23 confirmed kids in my class. Today, I had 7 kids out sick. Roughly a third of my class.

Math

I got this really cool math idea from the  kindergarten conference this past summer. You take a pipe cleaner and some beads, thread the beads onto the pipe cleaner and make a bracelet.  I tried it with 5 beads today. Everyone counted out 5 beads (well, everyone who COULD counted out 5 beads). Unfortunately I have this small cadre of children who can’t count to 5 (and what is REALLY funny is that it’s pretty much the SAME little group of kids who don’t know any letters). Anyway, I digress.

With the 5 beads on the bracelet, they can then do all of the math facts for the number 5 (again, assuming they can count to 5) just by sliding the beads around. Take 1 away, how many are left? Take 3? Ect.

Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Idiotic Tests

This test is to provide data for the first grade teachers as the kids come into their class at the beginning of the year. Most of the math test was OK, but the last two pages were INSANE. So I’m going to give you an example.

This is what I read to the kids:
“For the last five questions on the test, you will be using the pictograph on page 4. Once you find your answer, you will mark it using the answer circles on page 5. (Now this is ALREADY a problem, this is not kindergarten thinking here, multiple pages, multi-step directions….) Does everyone see where the pictograph and answer circles are? (make sure everyone is on page 4 and 5 you betcha ).

The pictograph-
Ms. Hill’s students voted for their favorite games. The pictograph shows how they voted. Each game is marked with a letter. Put your finger on the letter A that marks the game of Hide and Seek. The other games are marked with the letters B, C, and D. You will use those letters to answer the next two questions. uh huh

• Look at the pictograph. Put your finger on the letter that marks the game that Ms. Hill’s students voted for the LEAST. Mark your answer by filling in the circle under the letter in the row marked 16 on page 5. (multi step ORAL directs that involve a pictograph IN A FORM THEY HAVE NEVER SEEN involving multiple letters and numbers and spread over two pages)
• Look at the pictograph. etc for MOST.
• Look at the pictograph etc for how many voted for hopscotch?
• Look at the pictograph. How many of Ms. Hill’s students voted for jump rope (3) and kickball (4) as their favorite game? Fill in the circle under that numeral in the row marked 19 on page 5. (what almost every kid did here was mark the 3 on number 19 and the 4 on number 20. I had to get them to erase their choice on number 20 and then they marked BOTH the 3 and the 4 on number 19) I had to TELL them that it was addition. Then most of them got the number 7)

Monday, October 2, 2006

Repeating Patterns Cont.

So today, I had a guy in my room (he is a part time kindergarten aide, he’s going to be working with my low kids but hasn’t really started on that yet) watching me teach, I was doing math and I was using the overhead and some transparent colored markers. I put the pattern A B A B A B on the over head and asked a kid if they could come up and make the pattern with the markers. One of my kids did. Then I asked another one to do the same pattern but use different colored markers. We did it with A B B A B B A B B, A B C A B C A B C, A A B C A A B C A A B C and a couple of others, nearly all of my kids got it the first try. The kids amazed the guy. We then did it with me making the pattern and them writing the letters for the pattern, they made more mistakes this way, but still did really good.