Who ever thought giving a spelling test would be so much fun? I thought we should give a "practice test" so students know what to study for tomorrow. Students seem to be really interested in the fact that I'm a teacher at the university, which is nice. We'll see how they do.
We've been doing the D.O.L. thing every day, and I'm beginning to wonder about that. Of course we assume that if children can do that well, they should be able to edit their own writing well, but I'm not sure that's the case. I think about all the D.O.L. done every day across the country and wonder whether it can be done better. It's the old debate about whether we teach skills in isolation or have them all put together. Of course, a combination is best, but when you take a look at even one of these, you realize all the grammar and spelling rules that have to be taught and learned.
We also gave everyone another one-minute fluency timing, because the rest of the class did so much better on their second timing than on the first. Hopefully we can get a handle on this data. I'm planning to take everything home over the weekend to give a solid look at each student's individual score on each of our assessments. They're far from perfect, but hopefully all together it will give us a complete enough picture that we will be able to assess the students' needs and figure out who needs the most help. I'll be taking those students out (I know, horrible, ability-grouping, bad, bad) with the special educator in order to give them some more focused reading instruction the second half of class.
No comments:
Post a Comment