Sep 21

We're trying to introduce one new part of speech each week. This week we're moving on to adverbs after breezing through adjectives, which I don't think these students get. I gave them an informal quiz to evaluate, and it looks as though about a quarter of the class is confusing adjectives with verbs, and a couple with pronouns. We did verbs before adjectives, and pronouns before that, so it looks as though the confusion is snowballing. I emailed the teachers, so hopefully we'll be able to review that. It's just like college, where you learn something, get tested, and then forget it, and on it goes. I'm still not convinced, though, that teaching parts of speech is actually going to help with writing. Not that I'm so skilled at making this connection for them.

We did almost the entire class in small groups today, and it was highly effective at least for my group. They say checking engagement is what it's about, and I could really see that today. I introduced the vocab words by using real sentences, not just reading the definitions to the whole class. One of our reading assessments was about child labor. It encouraged students to think about the story and make and write down predictions and thoughts as they went along. Even though that's like pulling teeth it was helpful to them later when the worksheet presented them with multiple-choice questions regarding the vocab words and events in the passage they had just read. I also looked up some famous child labor photos for them with captions. It's so rewarding when students actually seem interested in what you're teaching. I had them do a little math as well, figuring out how long ago these events occurred. They always seem to respond so well when I look up photos, maps, etc. on the Internet to accompany the story they're reading -- they don't even try to horse around when they get up to see the computer. Amazing.

Meanwhile, I think we are doing some good in this class, but it still doesn't feel organized to me. We do a little of this and a little of that, and someone needs to put it together. We do DOL, grammar, writing, spelling, and reading. This is probably why someone thought up state standards, to help teachers get organized. Not sure if it works, though.