Pushing Ahead

We had our assessment on explorers today. I coarsely looked through them, but was fairly pleased with the result. The questions that were missed tended to be those that required some close reading of the question (exp: "where did Columbus BELIEVE he reached?") or the text (religious beliefs). I haven't even thought about the writing yet, but I'm hopeful.

Coming up next we are traveling to the early colonies. What is a colony? What was colonial life like? I sat down and mapped out my outcomes for the unit. What I need to look at is the list of reading gle's I want to hit, and how I am going to accomplish that. Comparing and contrasting will be one of the main things, as the various colonies are detailed in the text. Since we've done that once, I'll be excited to see the next round come a bit easier.

Wiki Stuff

Found this today via twitter... worth checking out. It has a crazy amount of wiki information and use in classrooms. I don't tweet very much education stuff, but I do follow many educators for all their professional network stuff.

Mountain Climbing

I found this slide over at Dangerously Irrelevant. It reminded me of a quote from a running book I am re-reading. In the book (Run Faster) Brad Hudson talks about goal setting, and how runners need to set high goals. Those goals need to be high enough to challenge you and keep you interested, but not so high that you'll never reach them (and constantly feel like you're failing).

I think of that in my practice as well. There are many teachers who I read about that inspire me on a daily basis. Reading the Tempered Radical, Learning is Messy, Two Writing Teachers, or the Reading Zone (or any of those in my blogroll), I realize how much room I have to grow. I want to be like some of the teachers in my building that have taught for a few years, and are doing wonderful things with their kids. But I need to worry about being the best first year teacher I can be, and move on from there.

Weirdest, Bar None

Today was the oddest day of my short teaching career, including student teaching. The rain in the morning started to throw us off, as did having a sub for one of my teammates. But those shouldn't be that big of a deal. Perhaps it was the absence of some kids, while others had returned from near week long sickness. Whatever it was, I hope it is gone on Monday. I fear that it won't be because of Halloween, and our fall celebration on Friday. But we talked about it before leaving: we aren't taking kids to the party who haven't been focused all week. We'll have our fun, but we need to do the work to earn it.

Next week we've got an assessment on explorers, and a new unit on the colonies. Additionally I am starting a writing unit delving into essays. Reading the Units of Study book on essays has me excited to get started. I think it will be fun, meaningful and relevant to the kids.

As an aside, the presentations/projects I received today were great. Really good stuff.

Goal Setting

We are in the midst of finishing our opinion piece on explorers. Last week I asked the 60+ kiddos to find some information about explorers. They needed to read strategically, looking for ideas that were in the social studies text. The questions ranged from: where was the explorer from, to how did the explorer help/hurt native people. The kiddos were able to easily find some of the explicit information, but inferring was more difficult (isn't it difficult for everyone?!). From those pieces of information we compared and contrasted the effects of European explorers, and worked towards drawing conclusions (do you think they were positive or negative, and why? what facts support your opinion?).

Since the tasks were so diverse, I've had to teach a myriad of skills. For example we started with identifying important information in text, then transitioned into the reading skill of compare/contrast. After that we worked on our thinking, and how we evaluate information (with the idea of the two column chart being like a scale). Where I have had to circle back, and often, has been how to structure writing. In many ways the writing is similar to a summary, as you have a topic sentence followed by facts to support that sentence. But I've found myself repeating the sequence, and reteaching the sequence each of the past 3 days. Has it sunk in? Not necessarily, which tells me that I need a more engaging teaching point as well as more guided practice.

I will admit that I am excited to look through their work. I want to see if they hit everything on our writing checklist (topic sentence, 3 supporting facts, opposing opinion, closure, readability, etc) as they have assured me they have. Next time around I will be introducing a self-assessment piece. I want them to assess where their own writing is, and what they need to do in order to make it better. I already do something like this for their homework and it has worked well. Now if I could only get it out of my box of teaching stuff....

Conferring With Authors

Writing conferences are a wonderful tool for writing instruction. I feel like they are the backbone of instruction, as they allow the teacher to see what lessons students are employing. From there you can provide feedback, learn more about the student as a writer and person, and you can make changes to your instruction. These conferences are where I find my instruction to be most meaningful, as you can move students along in a way that is individualized to where they are in the writing process.

What I've noticed is that I need to make some changes to my Writer's Workshop (my homeroom literacy time as a whole). My writing workshop has been on a 3 days on/off cycle, alternating with reading. But the cycle is too quick and momentum is lost too quickly. I feel like we are returning to "small moments" for the 8th time since September. It feels stagnate, and change needs to be made. So I'm hoping to put a substantial dent into my writing instruction by going for the next 2-3 weeks with writing, then going for the following 2-3 weeks with reading instruction. I'm less concerned about reading instruction, largely because they are receiving that instruction (from me) during our social studies time.

Ultimately I need to consider my end objective... I want my kids to develop a love of reading and writing. They won't love writing when it comes in 3 day bursts every 2 weeks. You love writing when you get to dive in deep and apply an assortment of strategies that lead you towards improvement. The only sad thing is that I won't be trying out any of the strategies from Strategies That Work 2 quite yet with my homeroom kids. The book is wonderful and worth picking up.

What Do You Value?

In my social studies rotation we have focused on reading comprehension. A big part of that, in nonfiction particularly, is finding the main idea. But you can only go so far with that. Ultimately we need to be exercising our thinking skills, and trying to make sense of the information.

So the past 3 days have been focused on forming conclusions. "What do you think, did explorers have a positive impact on history or a negative impact?" Aside from the question "what do you mean 'impact'?" it has gone pretty well. I had them think of a scale, with the idea that the things which are most important to us influence our decisions/opinions.

We took some statements about explorers (conquered the Aztecs, found new land, etc) and placed them on a two-column chart. Then we looked at them altogether, and made a judgement one direction or the other. How successful was that? Mixed. Some really struggled looking holistically, while others were very clear about their opinion. The writing is still a work in progress, and tells me that I need to provide more writing instruction to get them where I want them to go. But I was happy that they were struggling with the ideas of positive and negative impacts. When I have kids saying, "Mr Hanson, it could be both positive and negative" I know that they are thinking critically about the information- precisely my objective.