Aug 18

The first thing we did today was listen to a "rap" to assist in vocab learning. I can understand why we think this is a good idea -- because it's motivating and gets more senses involved. BUT... we have to do more with it. This one is particularly convoluted and I don't know what child in his/her right mind would think this one was "cool." We have to engage children in using the vocab in multiple ways, not just receiving it passively. So maybe we could have the words on the walls, have them practice spelling and covering, saying the words in a sentence, or maybe performing parts of the rap in front of peers. Small group work might be helpful, something non-worksheet-oriented. Making your own rap would be hard; maybe we could find some kind of poem outline.

We took children outside individually to retest those who needed testing on a higher level. We were shocked when every single child did better; one went from 100 words on a 4.0 passage to 140 on a 4.5 passage! How could this happen? We profs tell our students that this is the way to go -- test children on a one-minute fluency timing, and that's their level. How could this happen? I'll tell you, the children seemed a lot more relaxed this time; maybe, as one instructional assistant said, they went out with us last time, nothing bad happened, so they weren't actually in trouble as we said. So maybe you have to do multiple timings with passages at different levels. I'm recommending that everyone be retested at the 5.0 level.

Then there's this issue -- these children were put in this particular class because they were reading at 4.0 level, or two grades behind. Now we're wondering why some of them are here. Of course we're assuming they have fluency issues, but maybe they don't. I'm planning a comprehension assessment, but my guess is it's more likely to be class behavior, attitude, perhaps very poor spelling, etc. I believe these children were placed in this class as a result of one test score, from a standardized test taken last year. So now I'm wondering whether the classes are going to be shuffled around, and as always, I'm wondering what we're going to be doing for them.