Although I intended to do more posts during the week to reflect on the start of the school year, once again I am finding myself at another Saturday. Last week was my first Spanish week of the year. My planning over the summer has definitely paid off, but there is still a lot to get organized and in place. Over the last couple of weeks I finalized the rubrics that I will use for various regular routines/features in my classroom: reading logs, writer's notebook, reader's notebook, social studies interactive notebook, reading workshop, and writing workshop. It took me a while to decide exactly how I wanted to organize my thoughts and to pin point exactly what the expectations were and the behaviors demonstrated that would match up to letter grades. While I have had systems set up to assess all of these areas before (except reader's and interactive notebooks which I am trying out new for the first time this year), each year I reevaluate them and they get better with time.
So far this year, as I mentioned last week, I have been really happy with the turn out of some of the new ideas that I have been trying out. Soon I will be posting some of my students' comments in response to some of Aimee Buckner's ideas for reader's notebooks.
Until then, here is a quick overview of the same areas that I addressed last week.
WORD STUDY
This week I did our first whole class word study. We looked at gu+i/gu+e and qu+i/qu+e. When I chose and created this sort, I had not had my students complete the Spanish spelling inventory yet. I just chose an area that I thought would be helpful for most of the students. We emphasized the sounds they hear and how to distinguish between differences such as gi as opposed to gui.
On Monday I administered the Spanish inventory with my whole class, and my practicum student was able to complete the form to analyze how each of my students were spelling (both the inventory and analysis form were from Words Their Way with English Learners: Word Study for Spelling, Phonics, and Vocabulary Instruction). The information from this will help inform my decisions on the sorts we will do for the rest of the year. It looks like Ortografía de la lengua española will be a helpful resource when creating my Spanish sorts, and I just noticed that they have a newer 2009 edition out.
READ ALOUD
The read aloud of Cornelia Funke's El Señor de los Ladrones (The Thief Lord) has been going well. We are still getting to know the cast of characters in the book as a class. I am picking up on some of the clues that I missed the first time reading it that point toward the thief lord's secret. Once we have read the whole book as a class I will be able to use the text as an example of discovering something new each time you read a text. For now I need to bite my tongue and act like it is my first time reading it without pointing out the subtleties that Funke includes.
READING WORKSHOP
This week reading workshop went well. I was able to complete Spanish running records with all of the students that I needed to. Because the resource we have for Spanish running records does not go up as high as the QRI that I use in English, a large percentage of my students have already demonstrated proficiency in the highest level. I also had a chance to have one on one conferences with a handful of my students. I always love getting to know each of my students as readers in two languages through a wide variety of sources. Next week I will complete as many QRIs as I can in English. Once those are complete, I will be ready to start small group instruction and be able to have more individual conferences.
WRITING WORKSHOP
After completing a Slice of Life Story in English last week, this week they completed one in Spanish. Our writing workshop still does not look like it will long term throughout the year, but it is only the second week. Students still need a lot of guidance on knowing what they should be doing, so next week I will continue to work on writing workshop procedures as we move into feature article writing. Before I wrote about how I had wanted to get a newsletter started last year, and then one of my students wanted to start a school newspaper, so we are going to build it in as part of our writing workshop. I am excited about starting this unit, because unlike my quick Slice of Life Stories genre study, I have a lot of personal mentor texts from when I was the features editor for my college newspaper. I feel more prepared for this unit of study, whereas with Slice of Life I still want to improve it a lot before I teach it again.
SOCIAL STUDIES
This week I continued my general geography review. I used some lesson ideas from World History For Us All. I did not use them exactly as they were since they are all in English, but it was a good foundation for my lesson. I especially liked their teaching unit 0.1 Lesson 2, maps of space. We did the outside version, and I adapted the lesson to fit into our interactive notebook format. It was fun to see the students thinking about perspective, and I will be able to refer back to this key social studies concept of the impact of perspective often. I also formed another lesson based on their unit 0.2 lesson 2 How many continents are there? We also did a world map activity where students labeled the continents and key features listed on our state standards. Students will keep these maps in the back of their Interactive Notebooks all year long as a reference that we will refer to often in order to discuss how geography impacts history.
WHAT'S NEXT
This weekend I am going to take advantage of the holiday weekend to spend time with my family today and tomorrow. Then Monday I will go in as if it were a regular work day and get a lot of planning and paperwork done. I have a lot of notebook and writing assessments to do, and I also need to map out a plan to make sure that I can manage assessing them in a more time efficient manner. My 51 students have been producing a lot of writing and reflections. I love the thought that has been going in to these activities, but I need to figure out how I can give them sufficient feedback, as well as utilizing them to inform future decisions.
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