First Quarter Update

Once again, the school year is flying by. This week we had parent-teacher conferences, and it was a great feeling to have all of my scheduled families show up, which is typical for my school. We are now officially in October, and by the end of the month, the first quarter will be over. This year my main adjustment has been a nice shift to only teaching reading and writing, but having less class time for the content areas. I have been carefully balancing how to best utilize the time available, and I can tell that I will continue to adjust and readjust, still trying to weave some components in.

I also had a realization in the first few weeks that over the last three school years my content responsibilities have narrowed, as well as the amount of time that I spend with each class. As a result, I inadvertently focused more and more on my content, rather than taking the time to firmly establish a sense of classroom community, so I did some back pedaling after the first couple of weeks to try to compensate for trying to dive into academics too fast, at the expense of getting to know you activities. This was especially essential for my 6th grade class, since my 7th and 8th graders were returning students, so we already had a greater sense of community.

One of the most exciting changes this year is that I have been collaborating with our TOSA for reading support to have her push-in to my classroom instead of pulling out students. So far we have both been very excited about the possibilities and it seems to be going very smoothly. We are both learning together and meeting frequently to discuss how we can best support all of the readers in our classroom in flexible groups. Our first round of book clubs are up and running, something that I always love.

I finally let go of having a reading log, and instead chose to focus on a books completed log with a reading reflection post on a Google Sites page for each student. I am still reflecting on this change, but my initial thoughts are that it has been positive. One initial challenge was that it was a few weeks into the school year before we had our technology parent meeting to get technology agreement forms signed and returned from parents and students. In that span of time some 6th graders had read multiple books and then felt overwhelmed about the prospect of updating their site with every reading reflection. Instead, I made updating the site optional. Instead, they were required to at least list the titles of the books but gave the option to maintain a paper/pencil copy of the response, rather than adding them all on-line. I am assessing one English and one Spanish book response each month. We already have a note to ourselves to have parents fill out technology agreements in our 5th grade spring parent meeting so that we can start the year ready to utilize technology.