Yesterday I started thinking about syllabi, and how at the college level we're always so careful to put in how students will be graded, points for this and that etc. In K-12 we just seem to randomly throw out points, this will be graded, this won't... students are confused. Even though I work with students the majority of whom tend to not care about grades, I think this courtesy should be extended to them as well. Yesterday the students (and I) were surprised when they found that a homework was worth 50 points and something else was only worth 5. It didn't even make sense to me, but they have no way to track their grade. It's tough enough to encourage low-achieving students to care about their grades, although it seems like some of these students do.
Again more of a struggle to determine reading level. This weekend I've taken all the data home to try to organize students into ability groups by their scores. We now have four one-minute fluency timings for many of these students, so we should have some good data. I have also graded Friday's the D.O.L. quiz, and results are abysmal. How do we teach capitalization, punctuation, and grammar to children who haven't mastered it yet? I'm pretty sure it's not the same thing we've been doing with them. I need to look up the research for this. The sped research says direct instruction of grammar conventions, but not sure how to accomplish this. Right now it's hit and miss, and we're clearly missing.
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