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.

More Reading First

So, two days of being observed, and by being observed I mean as many as 6 extra adults in my room at the same time during the observing, and one day of “co-operative” teaching where their person comes in and co-teaches with me, modeling how they think things should be done and then, “helping” me teach my part of the co-teaching.  I’m just glad it’s over.  …………  I HOPE it’s over.  At least for the time being anyway.  I know it’s a full moon and all, but my kids are going nuts now.  Too many disruptions, and routine changes.

And while I have listened, nodded my head and smiled, on a number of levels I am also frustrated.  Over all though it has generally been valuable.  After some discussion, we have made some simple changes in classroom layout that will make things more affective, and we introduced some changes in some of the routines which frankly I welcome if they will change some of my kids disruptive behaviors.  They want me to use more effective ways to involve more of the children in the actual process.  Some of these are co-operative learning strategies.  The easiest one to implement with kinder kids is probably the “think, pair, share” model.  To work in kindergarten it needs structure.  We started out by assigning the partners at their tables before they moved to the carpet.  We assigned them partner names, in this case, partner A and Partner B.  That way we could get specific in telling them what to do.  “A, tell B what you are going to do after school.”  “B, raise your hands,”  etc, etc.   Another specific thing she modeled for me, something that I had gotten sloppy on, was using specific hand signals to illicit behaviors.  Such as one for think time, one for group response, etc.  If I can retrain the kids to move away from blurting out the answers and cheating the others of a chance to respond that would be great.  So all in all, I learned some things and will be making some changes to tighten things up a bit.

Was everything good?  Not in my book. Yesterday she made reference or alluded to the “fact”  that the 5 day cycle in Trophies was cyclical in that the same things or types of things or instruction tended to happen on the same days of the 5 day cycle in each weekly unit.  I hadn’t really picked up on that during the last three years of teaching Trophies.  I had heard it alluded to, but hadn’t really “seen” it.  I had dismissed my not seeing it as being due to the fact that we were on a 6 day teaching rotation at my last school to accommodate the art, music, science, library and PE specialists schedules, and also due to holidays and staff training days, we rarely actually taught day one on Monday and day five on Friday on any kind of consistent basis.  But since she brought it up, I took some time last night and looked at the schedule over multiple weeks.  I still don’t see it.  It might be the case in the upper grades, but I can’t find it in the kindergarten sequence.

Some of the other things they did, or showed me, or want me to do  are iffy.  For example, I went out and spent $35.00 on dry erase markers (the ones available at school were the high odor ones) so that she could have the kids use small white boards at their tables.   I hate using paint or markers in class, they are messy and the kids get into trouble with them.  It’s also a management issue.  Money is tight right now, and getting tighter in my school and district with millions being cut from the district budgets by the state. They can write with pencil or crayon on paper just fine.  Or better yet, I have these special tablets I purchased at the National Kindergarten Conference two years ago that are made up of iron powder between two layers of plastic that kids can write on with magnetic stylists.  She didn’t want to use them.

“Worksheet” is a bad word on general principle with them.  Regardless of how appropriate the selected worksheet might be, (in fact, presented as center activities, my worksheets are OK) but if I use the same worsheet whole group, it’s bad.  They appear to want the kids rotating through a variety of small group centers rather than doing the same work in a larger group.  If most of it’s the same work, why should it make a difference?  It’s not like the whole group work is all that my students do, they leave the seat work to do computers, small group instruction, and some other small center activities, it just the primary activity that they start they daily work from.

The specialist appear to want fidelity to the Reading program, but they pick and chose the parts they want to fidelity to, but are reluctant to allow me (or the other teachers for that matter) to do the same.  To show letter formation, I use a Frog Street Press DVD, I sometimes use different music selections than the ones that come with the program.  For my Morning Message, shared writing activity, they even changed out my paper tablet for crying out loud.  I’m not buying the ones they provided, the giant post it note variety.  The first time they don’t have the replacement tablet, I’m back to my old ones that cost about two thirds less.

Reading First

When I came to my new school this fall, I was told that it was a “Reading First” school, going into year 4 or 5 of the grant, which ever year, we are in the final year.  No “Reading First” as such next year,  at least any part of it that involves spending money.  I was a little curious about “RF” knowing nothing about it, and asked some questions, the reading specialist initially got a little huffy and told me, “It’s BEST PRACTICES, if you don’t want to do it, why did you come here?”  Which wasn’t MY point in asking the questions in the first place, I had just come off of the best year of teaching kindergarten and reading that I had ever had, and was on a kind of high about that, I wanted to be able to replicate it.  I wasn’t sure how much “RF” was going to impact that.  Trophies and most other components of my reading program are the same at the new school.

Well, it hasn’t much.  I’ve only had one specialist into my room on two different occasions, for relatively short times and little to no feed back.  Anything they have suggested, I’ve tried to implement.  Today, we had State visits.  I  had just finished the Whole group instruction and was breaking up for seatwork, centers and small group instruction when the five of them came in.  They blew in, and less than 10 minutes later, they blew back out.  I gather they will be back around tomorrow, and one of them will meet with me on my prep to talk about my reading program, but other than that, I’m still pretty much in the dark.

I have a hard time turning 5 year olds loose in centers unsupervised,  Centers should be developmentally appropriate, they should be differentiated, and meaningful.  Not too hard, but not too easy, yet something that they can do on their own with a minimal amount of help.  Well that’s easier said than done.  My high group are beginning readers.  My bottom group know fewer that 10 letters and sounds a piece.  The groups in the middle, are, in the middle.  It’s difficult to make centers that meet all of those needs and criteria.  So many center activities are so time consuming to make, who’s got the time?  I’m already spending 10 to 15 hours a week outside of class on school work.  If I had a life, I couldn’t do that. Those super teachers, that everyone hears about, like “The Essential 55″ by Ron Clark, they don’t have a life outside of teaching, and when they get a life, their teaching changes.  You cannot do a 30 year career burning your energy at that level.

I tend to line them up with a number of pages of seat work, the seat work is work based on the worksheets they have in Trophies, only more of it.  The typical Trophies worksheet, for example the one today, had four places on the page, for them to write a letter Nn.  And another page with maybe 20 letters on it, some of which are Nn’s, and they circle the Nn’s. That’s not worth the paper it takes to run it off.  So I do essentially the same activities, but they have to write more and find more letters.  Same skills, but more practice.  So everybody starts out doing the same seat work, it’s grade level appropriate, and as they work on it, some are going to computers, and some are working with me in small group.  As they finish their basic seat work, they then have a few centers that they can rotate into.  But the centers aren’t the main work at this time, they are ancillary to the seat work which everybody does first.  I think that this approach might not be the way they want me to do it.  We’ll see.

The Write Tools

I spent the last two days getting inserviced on this writing program.  We are using it as part of our Reading First Literacy program.  I think I like it better than Write From the Beginning which goes along with Thinking Maps.  For me, it seems more user friendly.  The hard part as always is in adapting it down to Kindergarten.  It looks like mostly at first just modeling the process whole group, so that when they CAN write they automatically use the strategies.  Pretty straight forward.

I was sitting there in the first day of the training (Thursday) though, and the presenter mentioned that on Friday she would be going into greater depth in this one area and I thought to myself, “Oh Oh.”  I had only ordered a sub for one day.  I have signed up this fall for so many different trainings, (most cancelled due to low enrollment) that I had totally spaced that this one was a two day training.  I quickly called the school to see if the sub could be held over, but she already had another assignment, so the kids had two subs in two days.  Then Monday and Tuesday are no-school days, so Wednesday aught to be interesting after a 6 day separation.

The three days before school begins.

These three days before school starts are filled with meetings and a mad rush to get the rooms and everything else ready for the first day of school, which for most of the teachers at my school and in the rest of the district, means that school starts on Monday. I have to do the three days of meetings, even though my class doesn’t begin until Sept. 15. The hard thing about teaching at a year round school for most teachers is how little time there is between the end of one year and the beginning of the next. Most of our teachers just ended their contracted year on August 11 and they reported back to work yesterday for the new year. So they didn’t get much of a break. In kindergarten that means shifting your thinking from kids that are basically at First Grade one day to two weeks later facing beginning of the year kindergarteners and all that that entails.

One of the things about teaching in a year round setting is that at any given time part of the school is on break.  And this year, I’m on the rotation that has our very first break the first three weeks of school (I guess SOMEONE has to do it).

My new school is doing many of the things and programs that I was doing at my other school. The one NEW thing that is different is that this school is a Reading First school. I know that it means more people in and out of my room while I teach, and that both I and my teaching will be monitored and supported more than I have been used to in the past. Today was the first day that I got really good information about what that really looks like and what it entails. I think I’m going to like it, it makes sense to me. I’m sure that I will have to make some adjustments, but Reading First gives me support in making those changes in my teaching. And really, best practices are best practices. They don’t change, so I’m thinking I might not have to change as much as I thought I would.

I do know that we are going to be jumping into interventions for the Tier II kids kids sooner than I have in the past. Last year we started our Voyager intervention groups in January. Another thing that will be kind of hard is that the District mandated window for the first Benchmark tests in Dibels just happens to fall on the very first week my kids are in school. THAT’S just going to be wonderful. All other kindergarten kids in the district, in all of the regular 9 month schools, and in all of the year round schools on the other calendar retations other than mine, (80% of the year round students) will have been in school for at least two weeks prior to taking the assessments.

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).