Monday, Day Twenty-Five

Today was my first day teaching the third grade language arts class. It went really well. The students are reading a story titled "The Talking Cloth". Part of their lesson is three-letter cluster and unexpected consonants. So before the story we discussed both of those in depth and the students completed a workbook page. I then told them while following along they should listen for words that follow that pattern. Unfortunately there were not many. The consonant patterns are in the student spelling words, so they will have lots of practice with that. After the story we did a cluster map were the students had to give 4 things associated with a character from the story. We used the Aunt who had the cloth and the cloth itself. They did very well on this exercise. I could tell from this exercise that they had grasped the story pretty well. We also did a reading comprehension test in their AR program. They do not get AR points but they do get a reading grade from this test. Scores ranged from 80 - 100. I was pleased.

My little guy spent time in the evening class with me going over his numbers and letters. We used the TOUCH number system and he identified 4 of the 9 without counting the dots. After some leading he could count the dots and tell the number, but he needs to know the number without a leading counter. We will work more tomorrow with that. We also did flashcards with the alphabet. He could identify 20 of the 26 letters. He got 'm' and 'n' mixed up and when I told him the 'm' was 'm' not 'n' he could not figure out what the 'n' was. He also missed 'g, h, and i'; three in a row, does that mean something. I have a set of flashcards that I plan to send home with him and try to get his parents to help. I am not sure that they are helping with the numbers but I must try to get them to help. We did not attempt the sounds, I want him to know what the letters are first. This was only his first assessment, it just gave me and idea of where he is at this moment. I hope to change that within two-weeks.

My long lost student has returned. One of the child's parents is one of our military and leaving for Iraq soon. So he was spending ever minute he could in their presence. I can understand and respect that. He worked very hard today to try to catch up. He even participated in our classroom assignment. We finished up our schedule from the challenge workbook. We created a large schedule on a dry erase board, where students were required to enter the activity, the digital and the analog time. This went very well. Afterward the students had to follow a link in their email to a website that had 10 questions about elapsed time. Most done very well, scores ranged from 70 - 90. One student figured out how he could correct the ones he missed to show a score of 100. Of course I did not accept the second score on praised him for correcting what he missed. Tomorrow we will begin calendars and time, this should be a pretty easy lesson for them.