Now we're getting the hang of it... sort of. All those adults in the room and we were doing all these full-group activities. Now that I worked hard to get ahold of the appropriate reading level for Reading Naturally.... we didn't have enough stations. We tried to rotate stations today but ended up overlapping, so nobody could get anything done! Anyway, we're trying something different, and I can see the students are so much more responsive in small groups, just as we always say.
I'm really starting to wonder about DOL. We do it every day but our students still don't use capitalization and punctuation in their writing. They have to be reminded. Also, they may correct the mistakes during DOL, but they find more "mistakes" that were actually correct-- particularly spelling, putting in apostrophes that don't belong, capitalizing letters in the middle of sentences. Teaching writing is tough, and I'm not sure that we really know what we're doing here (and that includes me). I'm just thinking that the DOL may not be the way to go. Perhaps the way to go is to have them write for five minutes, then go over each one in a small group. The idea is to practice the same skills rather than skipping around, although I realize this idea is very controversial.
Again students fighting to be in my group!
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