Looking up

Our first 6 weeks grading period ended last Friday, and the grades are officially locked in place. We gave a cumulative math exam on Friday, and I was pretty pleased with the results overall. In my morning class, all 22 kids passed (above 70), and in the afternoon class, I still had a 30, a 45, and a few in the 60s, but the others did well -- and that one kid went from a 17 to an 80!

I'm starting to think there's hope yet.

This week has been rough, as we've given benchmark tests every morning. However, for the limited time we've had, the kids have done pretty well each day. Granted, we are going over 2 and 3 digit addition with regrouping, something that should be pretty easy for them. But they are all showing their work and making the effort, so that's nice to see.

Tomorrow is the math benchmark. Typically, these things are atrocious, especially the first one of the year, but I have high hopes. My kids know place value. They know how to round. They know how to write a number in word form and expanded form. Most of them understand how to find a missing number in a pattern. These are the things that should be tested. The problem usually arises in the wording of the questions. Some of them are ridiculously over-worded or use vocabulary that nobody outside of Harvard would ever use.

I seem to recall a question one year that asked, "What time does Tommy go to folklorien class?"

What The Folk-lorien???

Finally, some motivation that works!!

I think I have finally struck upon some valid motivation for one of my super-low kids!!

Let me explain the back-story. This kid is heavy-set, academically low, a talker, a player, a does-not-pay-attentioner, and generally all-around "slug." On the first math test, this kid got a 20-something. On the second math test, he got a 17. And these were not hard math tests, or unfair tests. He just was not trying at all, and it showed.

Conversely, a lot of my other kids HAVE been picking it up and trying harder. I am finally starting to get through to them that paying attention and doing their work the way we practice in class really CAN help them get the right answers and get better grades.

In my morning class, every single one of my kids who had scored low on the first test dramatically improved their grade on the second test, and the kids who had done well on the first test, also did well on the second.

In my afternoon class, which contains the "slug" (and several others), there wasn't quite the same dramatic results, but there were a few kids who improved and several others who passed both tests.

So I decided to make a really big deal about this. At the very beginning of school, I had gotten stacks of "Buy one adult meal, get a kid's meal free" cards from Denny's, Golden Corral, and Popeye's. So I took the time to fill them out with the kids' names, my name, our school name, etc along with the phrase "Math Improvement!" if they had improved their score, or "Math Skills!" if they had passed both tests.

I gave these out on Tuesday. Everybody in my first class got one, and they loved it. Somewhere around 60% of my second class got one, as there were still several kids with very poor grades.

On Wednesday, my "slug" started paying attention. He was raising his hand to answer questions. Correctly!! He brought the homework in on Thursday morning with work shown and completed. The kids took the 6-weeks cumulative assessment on Thursday, and this kid, while not having everything correct, had work shown for every question. He had labeled his coins, he had shown me his addition when he needed to, he had drawn place value charts.

When I graded the tests, I found that this "slug" -- who had made a 20-something on his first test, and a 17 on the second -- had scored an 80 on the 6-weeks test. An EIGHTY!!

Now maybe the planets aligned just right for him to finally get with the program. Maybe something I said about effort finally seeped through.

But I have a feeling it was the idea of free food that finally jump-started his engine.

And you know what, I'm ok with that.

Somebody will definitely be getting a Golden Corral coupon come Monday morning.

5 ways to improve my class

Today marks the beginning of the last week of school with this year's kiddos. We only go through Wednesday with the kids, then we have our teacher close-out (re: socialize and procrastinate) day on Thursday.

Since it is the end of the year, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on the past 9 months. It was indeed a crazy year, what with the layoffs, switching positions, getting a new set of kids 10 weeks into the year, etc.

Nevertheless, the move turned out to be a blessing in disguise, as I found that I really like teaching the bilingual kids, and they in turn showed their willingness to adjust and learn from me.

Here is a list of 5 things that I want to try to do a little (or a lot) differently next year:

5) Play games more often
I did make it a goal this year to try to play more math games. And we DID play more, relative to last year. But I want to play even more next year, time permitting. And that's really the problem -- the time. There is SO much material to pack in before the big test, and SO much time wasted by little things like misbehavior and not listening (not to mention slow, meticulous kids), that we often don't have much time for games. However, when we DID have time for them, all of the kids were on task, and they seemed to improve their skills.

4) Do the "Morning Message" more frequently
This was my first year (7 months, actually) of teaching language arts. So it took me a while to get my feet under me and find out what I was doing. OK, who am I kidding, I'm STILL trying to find out what I should be doing! But one of the things I would do about once a week or once every 2 weeks was the Morning Message. This was a short passage -- 2 or 3 sentences -- filled with grammatical and punctuational mistakes. The kids had to copy it down exactly as it appeared on the board and then make the necessary corrections. It was a fun exercise, it helped the kids recognize mistakes, and it showed them part of the editing process. Next year, maybe I'll up it to 2 or 3 times a week.

3) Be more strict about checking the problem of the day
Every morning, we started our day with a word problem. Every day, we went over the steps to working the problem, but I very rarely took it for a grade, as it is mostly for practice. Quite often, I would notice that kids weren't making the corrections at their desks, instead leaving incorrect operations and wrong answers on their paper. I need to find some better way to garner their attention to detail and checking their work. Perhaps this means having them switch with their partner to grade, but I prefer that they see their OWN work when we're grading the PoD.

2) Use more real-world examples
Last week, we started a projet that involved estimating the cost of an airplane ticket to a chosen location. Some kids thought a trip to New York City cost $2, some thought $1,000,000. The really sad thing was that when these kids asked their parents, many of THEM gave grossly incorrect estimates, like $40. Next year, we'll have to talk more about how much groceries really cost, how much gasoline really costs, how much an airplane ticket really costs.

1) Start the study guide much, much earlier
With about a month to go before the TAKS test (so that puts it at around end of March), I had what I considered to be a brilliant idea. Why not make a study guide containing a sample of everything we've learned so far this year?? It was one of those things that just made me feel stupid for not having thought of it years ago. And I really do think it was effective. The kids enjoyed making it, and having free time to study with it. However, I think it would be much MORE effective, and induce much more retention, if we started it from the beginning of the year and updated it as we learned each concept. That way, it would truly be something that they could continually reference and be quizzed over.