Final Thoughts for the Week

Alright, after several blogs about the good, the bad, and the ugly for the week, I'm sure you're ready to hear how it all panned out.

Let's start with the first graders. On Friday we had a mini-review of the vocabulary words and a basic plot breakdown. I then gave them their test: 4 multiple choice questions, 4 matching sentences to the pictures, and 2 short answer questions. There was a variety of vocabulary words and comprehension questions. This may not seem like it would take 35 minutes to take, but with struggling readers, it does. At the end of the class, I quickly skimmed their tests, curious to see how they did. Overall, pretty well. Even the student who struggles the most was able to answer many of the questions. Not bad, for the first time I've given a test I have written.

On to the 5th graders. On Monday I assigned a vocabulary homework assignment. The students had to write a short story about a car accident that included 4 vocabulary words (1 from each category-- noun, verb, adjective, adverb). On Friday, they had a similar form of assessment: same criteria, same length, different topics (plane crash, a war they've read about, or a shark attack). During the test, students kept raising their hands asking 2 things: can we use more than 4 words and can we write on the back if we need to? My answer to both questions: yes. However, if they chose more than 4 words, they had to circle the 4 they thought they used best, so that I could assess those. At the end of the classes (I gave the assessment in both 5th grade classes), I gathered the tests and quickly skimmed them. Not only did the students meet the criteria, many tests had 5-8 vocabulary words and 2 (or more) pages filled out. While this is impressive in and of itself, the grades were even better-- no student scored lower than a 70%... and even those were scarce.

The upper grades weren't given any assessment, but on Friday afternoon I had several 8th graders come up to me and say, "Miss, can you read what I wrote? I tried to do some of the things on the hand-out you gave us" outside of the class.

The week came to an end that I couldn't have been more pleased with. Yeah, there were some rocky parts, but when 3pm rolled around on Friday afternoon and my cooperating teacher asked, "So, how was the week?" I couldn't think of any response more fitting than "Teaching is so crazy. I love it."