Day Eight

Today I gave the students their chapter quiz. Yesterday was a refresher for them and today it did not appear to help them very much. It was kind of frustrating because I know that these kids know this material. Focusing is a big issue in our class. We are always reminding them of the task at hand, which I expected. But today the students wanted me to work every problem on the quiz as an example and I refused. The ones we did do as examples some did not even answer on their quiz. My ST and I had a long discussion about whether to retest or let it go. I told him I felt strongly that they could do better. We decided to go ahead with the full unit exam. He and I are confident they can do well if we only keep the distractions to a minimum. I was hoping for good quiz scores and we could have had a day they could play math games on the computers (they love to do that) but that is the way it is.

My work with the third grader and TOUCH math is going very well. We have a thirty minute block where these students come in to work on random assignments they need help with. After he finished his necessary assignments he wanted to play the math game on the computer. During this game he could tell me some of the numbers and when he stumbled we counted them with the TOUCH math. We used a multiplication game but I had him using multiples of 0. I did not want him too concerned with the multiplication so he could concentrate on the numbers themselves. This would also build his confidence, I am finding that he does not get much of that if he is not at school. He is doing better in just the short time we have been doing it. I did not have a chance to talk to my ST about sending a letter home requesting assistance in using the TOUCH math at home today. The school just got their grading system online usable and he was very busy with that.

Between student teaching and working full time at the Inn, I have not kept up with my reading. I do have some time this weekend to hopefully get caught up. I must get my lesson plans done also, but I think I can get it done. Tomorrow could be interesting when I tell the students we will be having the unit test. I expect they will be upset but I know they can do better and I have greater expectations than the 65's I saw today. We will see how they respond.

Also, the fourth grade students took a quiz over "The sinking of the Titanic" they had as an ebook through capstone libraries. This library is a great tool for these students they can associate movement in the pictures to the words that are being said. It is an Accelerated Reader book so it worked out very well for them. They all did very well on the AR test, I think the lowest score was an 80. My ST and I were very pleased and the students really enjoy the books in this format. Teachers at my school can access around 116 books and there are more ebooks in the library to view. I think this is really helpful for the students. We did a short reading like this for the third grade but they had great difficulty keeping up with the words. We discussed backing the reading level down a little until they are used to keeping up.

It was a good day, even though we do have to retest. The students were attentive and enthusiatic but distractions did prove to be too much during the testing period. But we will get it.