The Bag of Papers

First year teachers are typically guilty of being swamped under the deluge of papers. Keeping up with the assignments given, and the response from students is difficult. Add to that your planning, and other professional responsibilities and you can have a whale of a time keeping up. For me, I have a brown reusable sack that I use to carry by pile back and forth from school to home and back again.

While I have been putting small dents in the pile, it has stayed close to the same size for the past few weeks. Between giving back work, and then getting 60 student summaries, my pile just hasn't disappeared! Thankfully I sat down yesterday and got organized. I put them into piles based on their rotation, as well as alpha by first name. You might think that is a waste of time, but it makes life easier when inputting information into my spreadsheet. Afterwards I was able to go through a few piles, and started to see the paperwork disappear. Hopefully today is the day it goes away!

Meeting Goals

One of my goals for the year is to create an environment where students assess the quality of their own work. To do this, students will be involved in creating and utilizing rubrics. That was the goal that I wrote for myself back in Oct/Nov as part of our professional growth plan in the school district. Accompanying that was the benchmark that I attempt to implement at least 1 rubric within the first grading period.

This week was an opportunity to work on those goals, and see where we were with respect to progressing to meet them. Well I have used 3-4 iterations of rubrics for different assignments. I believe the students have found them useful, as they have given honest feedback about their work. Instead of simply saying "this is great" they will say "this is great because..." or "I think it was good, but needed to improve here..."

The trouble I have run into is returning work. I've struggled with that as a whole, in particular with respect to the rubric-ed items. Obviously that begs the question: why self-assess if you don't see the feedback in a timely fashion? That has been the question I've been pondering, as well as how I can be more efficient in the grading process?! My struggle is largely around ensuring that I give them feedback, record the information in my gradebook, then return it into their "Completed Work Folder." As a whole it just some stuff I am thinking about as I try to improve my practice.

Novel Study

Last week was hellish. Between observations, meetings, and more meetings I found myself struggling to make it to Friday. I was also out of the building Friday for a new teacher support training. I have mixed feeling about these sorts of things, largely because I hate being out of the building. I don't like making sub plans, nor the feeling that it might go down the tubes with the guest teacher. I usually am not enthused by the topics discussed, and find myself longing to be back in classroom for a majority of the day.

Ahh but Friday was different. The big takeaway was seeing how an experienced 5th grade teacher uses novels in her practice. While our district uses the basal reader, it also has a variety of other literacy materials. Novels are one of those resources. I've been wanting to incorporate the chapter books into my practice. Why? For one, I believe kids need to develop a love of reading, writing, and thinking. How do you get there? By reading voraciously in a variety of formats. Additionally it is a way to differentiate your reading instruction, moving from one size fits some to a more reasonable format.

The big drawback is the amount of planning. But that is what this week is for. One of the main things that this experienced teacher does is teasing the various skills out of the basal reader (provided for each unit in the basal reader), and then finding a way to apply them to the novel study. So you might be working on summarizing and questioning in the basal, but instead of using them in a small section of story you get to use them throughout a book... and get to see the end of the story (unlike in the basal!).

That is next week, a new thing for February.

Daily Grind

Coming back from break has been a bit of a grind. The first two weeks launched us into the Revolutionary War era, and this week is a continuation of that. But I've felt like it hasn't taken off the way I want, and I'm mired in a series of stops and starts. We completed our slave trade posters with mixed results, not entirely unexpected considering they spanned the 2 week break. We then started in on the events leading up to the Second Continental Congress, which seems to have taken an eternity.

As that was happening I've also strategized starting book groups (to break out of our basal reader), and weekly current events (to alleviate the pressure of daily homework, and lots of copying). The last two things were to start this week, but have been pushed back temporarily. Why? Well because this week has gotten in the way, and it hasn't even started. Meetings and observations clutter this week, and I have a sub for a new teacher support training on Friday. Instead we have some other intentional reading instruction in non-fiction, as well as easing into the current events. The current events should be fun though.

Wall Space

I have what might be one of the largest rooms in the building. Since it was a shared space, used by the 4th and 5th grades, it was a large common room with high ceilings and lots of light. The major downside is that there is little/no wall space. Anchor charts, question charts etc are usually left without a home. I finally moved a giant chart on explorers, as we aren't using it currently. I didn't just fold it up, I moved it to another wall... 8 feet up the wall! Same goes for our posters on the slave trade (which came out great). Room needed to be made for our Questions about the American Revolution... questions need to drive nonfiction (a case could be made for reading as a whole, but that for another day). So we put ours up.

Solid first week back. Next week we really dig deep into the Revolutionary War. I am excited because of the mix of fiction/nonfiction.

Small Time Chunks

I'm utilizing smaller blocks of time to get things done. My social studies/literacy block is an hour long 4 days a week, and 45 minutes on Wednesdays. The issue I've been trying to tackle is how to ensure I engage all of literacy, and not simply the nonfiction end of things. Its my Everest, and I am determined to make the hour block of time work.

I borrowed the idea from the Reading Zone, a posting I found a while back. The main difference is that instead of a read aloud, I am substituting leveled and independent reading (I'm hoping to start some book groups next week). Also, instead of 55 minutes, I am working with 60. I'm working on 15-20 minutes of reading, which is currently a short story from our basal reader. Following that is 40-45 minutes of social studies content, which still has reading integrated. My hope is to have Mondays be a strategy/skill instruction day and then the remainder of the week be focused on employing that strategy while I pull small groups. We'll see.

The driving force was a level of guilt I had. While I was providing some fictional reading, I was providing a vast majority of my instruction in nonfiction... barely nicking the surface of the wide array of fiction (particularly in intermediate grades). Part of me didn't feel bad (the part that recognized that a vast majority of what adults read is in the form of nonfiction- I forget the statistic on that, but it is well over 50%). But the other part was... well, wanting to do better.