Wednesday, Day seventeen

I have fallen behind in my posting here. I will not try to catch all of it up; I will instead try to recap things here and then move on. Student J seems to be trying but his diagnosis will still peak out and my ST is very good at pulling him back. There are times that you just can't . It seems the later in the day we ask him to write the worst it gets. He truly hates to write and is struggling. He wants to do well, just seems that at times he cannot win over his issues.

My students are doing so well with the data and graphing. They were supposed to perform a survey for in class use but they did not. We supplemented data and have move on. They have put their data into frequency tables, line plots, stem-and-leaf plots, and bar graphs. Students were having a lot of trouble keeping the different types of graphs straight. Now before each lesson I have created a copy of each type of graph that we have completed and I have a series of questions for each one. The first question for each of the graphs is "what type of graph is this". They are doing much better with the terminology now. We have also completed double bar graphs. Using different data of course, I had the students to actually complete the example that I use to test their knowledge before the new lesson.

I have given them the test over the data section and they did very well. Memorization is an issue with all the diagnosis competing in the classroom, but they are getting there. One of my students has real test anxiety. She tries so hard, just confuses things because of the anxiety. We are working with her to bring her out of that shell. Her test score was not as good as I would like it to be but she is trying to understand and when it clicks you can see it.

Tomorrow is my first observation. I am of course very nervous but it will be fine I think. We are ready for line graphs. I am concerned that the students will be confused because of line plots and line graph. I think I have a way to keep these separated in their knowledge. We will be doing an ongoing line graph to track our local high temperatures. I plan to have the students plot the temperature each day. I think this will help to keep everything straight. Also the students will go to the computer and in their email they will find a link to complete a graph online that they can email to me. This will be a lot of fun for them I think; they love anything to do with the computer. After this lesson we will be ready for a unit exam. I feel they will do much better than the last time. The review of each type of graph seems to be working very well.