There are positives and negatives to our fifth grade system. The most obvious negative is that I don't get to teach every subject. I love math, but it isn't my primary content area. I also don't have as much time for literacy as I'd probably like, but I've grown to enjoy using our rotation blocks as mini-lesson times. Instead of 90 minutes of reading instruction, with some writing built in, I've got 60 minutes to do a short mini-lesson and have kids practicing it. For those that have used the Units of Study materials for writing, I'm essentially doing that in reading.
Probably the best part of rotations is teaching a lesson multiple times. Lessons don't always work out. You assume that kids have some background knowledge that they don't, or you don't phrase something particularly well, or any number of other missteps occur in your teaching. Aha! You teach it again, 20 minutes later and have the opportunity to get it right.
That was the case on Tuesday. We were trying to use questions to be strategic in our reading of non-fiction (plans changed from fiction to non-fiction on Sunday night). We were then going to use those questions to help us mine information from the text, and put it into a table. I made the assumption that they had all used a table before. Yep, each row is for a cultural group and the information going across coordinates with the column up top. Wait, what?! Columns, rows, cultural groups?! I was able to make some adjustments within the lesson to make it work, and kids were successful. But the next time I taught it, I knew where the misstep had occurred, and was far more deliberate in teaching what went into each box... and how we would use the questions to guide us to that information. Ah! Re-teaching because you can, and not because you have to repair meaning for someone. So great!
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