A little time off

Well. I have my low group back. At the last minute I was given the green light to work with my low performing kids everyday. I am so thankful for this opportunity. Some pretty cool things happened when we switched classes. A few kids got wind that something was changing. So they switched themselves without asking. A few kids stayed in my class because they wanted to. Then some stuck themselves with the other teacher because they wanted to. It was priceless. We gave a few students a choice. Who will teach you better? Some students need rigid structure. That is not my style. Some students need a flexible environment to work at their own pace. That is my style. I have gifted kids as well as low performing kids. Although I only had them two days this week (due to the flooding) I have already had a glimpse of this working. Having the same group of kids everyday for 110 minutes. Teaching them both History and ELA. I have come to realize that there are two things that are important for these kids to perform well on these stupid state tests: vocabulary and reading comprehension. I am going to focus 80% of my lessons on those two things. Let me give you an example of how I used the IPADS to make this work. We have a website that we work on called "Edmodo". It is like a Facebook for school. I put all sorts of things on there including PDF files so kids can download whatever it is that we are working on. We are reading "The Ransom of Red Chief" by O.Henry. As I was reading the story out loud I realized that they have no idea what O.Henry is referring to in the story. (These are 5th-7th graders) How can they comprehend a story and have no picture in their head. The story is just a jumble of words. Things such as; maypole, buggy, bloodhound, and red haired freckle face boy, and a summit. This is all in the first page. Not to mention they probably cannot even picture the time period. So, as I read the story I told them to find pictures online of these things and post them on our Edmodo page. It helps them to see what the story is saying by use of visual images. These kids were brought up on visual stimulation. I think this will be very helpful. I also think that articles from Readers Digest will be helpful. They are short, clean, and easy reads. Yet, they have ideas that can be allowed for further discussion and keep kids relevant on current issues. I then created a dice game on Social Studies vocabulary and made it a competition. This went over real well. These kids LOVE dice. I bought a few inflatable globes and threw these around the class while they were playing the dice game. They all have short attention spans. I am giving in to those attention spans and working with them rather than fighting them. If I can help them use that natural ability to do 5 things at once, maybe that will help them in the long run. Teaching them to sit still and be quiet all the time is fighting their nature. How miserable. I have found a website called teacherspayteachers.com. I bought a few downloadable lessons and a set of 5 reading discussion cue cards. It is so cool. A teacher in Kansas made discussion cue cards for me laminated them and sent them in the mail. I paid her 35 bucks with shipping. What an awesome idea. Instead of paying companies, I pay people like me. One day I can do the same. I also ordered a book called "Teaching Outside of the Box" by LouAnne Johnson. I have not read very far into it, but it is inspiring me already. She wrote the book that inspired the movie Dangerous Minds. Her teaching philosophy is a lot like mine. Helps me to not feel so insecure about the amount of flexibility I give my children.