Teaching It Twice

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!

Short Week, Deep Breath

My school district has a funky midwinter break. Instead of President's Day week off, we have the Thursday and Friday before Pres. Day off. We then get the holiday off, and are back at it on Tuesday. As a whole, I'm excited for the break. I've got lots to do, and some sleep to catch up on.

We got a bunch done during the short week, but yet didn't make a dent in the content that needs to be covered. Why the running in place? Well because of our current events summaries. Backing up to the Super Bowl, I sat down to read 60 summaries of news events written by my kids (52-3 if you subtract kids who forgot their articles). The summaries just weren't of the quality that the group can produce. In fact, the words I would use to describe the effort would be: thoughtless and lazy.

Each rotation got a chance to hear some of the student work, from sentences that don't make sense to seeing sight words misspelled (ie precedent oboma, priuseos). They also heard work that was significantly over grade level, ie plagiarized ("Hey that sounds like the author of my article!"). I did so carefully, not naming names and allowing kids to keep their dignity. But you can bet that everyone was embarrassed with the quality of work to some degree. Usually I'll let a misspelling or an awkward sentence slide, but the number of careless errors littering the papers was alarming (lacking periods, no capitalization, fragments, misspelling names from the title, etc).

So we re-did them. I re-taught how to find a main idea, how to craft a main idea into a sentence that makes sense, as well as how to put it all together. What was the result? Significantly improved summaries. I told them I'd take the higher of the two scores, and discard the other as that would likely confuse them more than help them. The combination of high expectations for student work, and explicit reteaching made the time useful for everyone.