Today was the fifth full day of school. Last week went well - I only had 17 children. This week I got new new ones - one a seemingly really sweet little girl, but will probably need a little additional tutoring here and there, and the other a boy who doesn't even know how to spell his own name. I'm told to expect another student in a day or two - he has a reputation that precedes him - I don't need another badass in there trying to take over the class, like I had last year. At least I don't have any of those old, overage boogers like we had last year. Hopefully he won't be overage at least - that's usually a pile of trouble waiting to happen. My kids are really good compared to some others I've seen - the "behavior class" has a boy who gets his food aat breakfast and lunch and dumps it right in the trash, and another who likes to curse - other students, teachers, other adults, whoever. Right now things seem to be going well. I spent much of these first few days going over my rules and expectations and drilling the kids on what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Little things like kids throwing paper away, sharpening pencils, going to the restroom, can lead to a lot of trouble if you don't have a plan for how to handle it. My number one rule this year (learned from previous experience) is stay in your seat. A lot of problems start when kids get up and walk around the room with no purpose or with the pretend purpose of sharpening a pencil or throwing away trash. I give them first thing in the morning to sharpen all their pencils and no trash goes in the trash can except for on the way to lunch and at the end of the day.
I'm slowly getting to know my kids - who will be studious, who will be my Tier III kids and who has trouble staying in the seat and closing their mouths. I have a lot of blabbermouths this year, but to credit them, they do participate in class a lot, for the most part. There are only a handful - about 3-4 kids - who get off task and don't pay attention and I have to keep reengaging them throughout the lesson. One kid, who is new to our school this year, got an office referral in 07 for urinating on another child's head, on the bathroom wall, and on a child's bookbag. Talk about disgusting - I hope he's gotten over that urge. But he is unidentified ADD - he cannot focus on one thing for more than 2 or 3 minutes. His work so far has been wrong or incomplete.l I'm going to be doing a LOT of small group interventions, too. I only have about 5 in my class that made a proficient score on the MCT2 May of last school year. No advanced. The rest are about evenly divided between basic and minimal. It is going to be a struggle. Basically I have to catch them up a year and a half to two years when it's hard enough to try to get students to pass the test when they are on grade level. Safe to say, most of the ones I have aren't. But....I don't let them know that...I told them that I had the "smart class" and I guess they believed me, at least a little bit, cause one of the girls was telling her last year teacher that she didn't think she could be in the "smart class." Hehe. I'm trying to keep my expectations high and PRETEND that I have a gifted class that can learn anything. We'll see - I'm giving a simple little test tomorrow covering some of the things we have really talked about so far - first & third person point of view, simple & compound sentences, and place value. Please, please let it be good.
We did a learning styles inventory last week - the results showed that most of my kids are "people smart," which means they like to work cooperatively.
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