Lesson 2: The benefits of long-term projects

Another lesson that I especially learned during my two week solo is just how beneficial long-term projects are, both for the students and the teacher!

My resident teacher does a lot of group projects and individual long term projects, but I really didn't notice all of the benefits until I was solely in charge of the class. Kind of like how you never know how the directions to somewhere as a passenger, but learn them really quickly as a driver.

During my two-week solo, there were two long term projects going on that are just now slowly coming to an end. In Reading, students read a new chapter of "Ms. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" every day, write down three to four vocabulary words, and answer four questions. Every 5 chapters, there is a test with multiple choice, vocabulary and 2-3 sentence short answer prompts.

In Social Studies, students are working in groups of two to three on researching an assigned colony in-depthly (we kept Roanoke for a total of 14 different groups). The main theme of the project is an advertisement campaign. Students are in charge of recruiting potential colonists from England to choose their colony. Students first answered questions about the colony focusing on history, climate, economy, religion, natural resources, and local Native Americans by researching both through reading provided library books as well as some web browsing. Then students created a slogan for their colony and sorted their information into the most important bullet points. Finally, students created a poster and prepared their presentation to the class in which they seek to convince their classmates to choose their colony. We are currently in the process of presenting these to the class.

Here are some pictures of the poster and presentation creation process:

I LOVE project-based learning! Seriously, love it! I think my students learn so much more than if I only lectured on colonies or if they just read the textbook. Because there is a purpose (convince your peers to come to your colony), my class is SUPER motivated. They have learned so much about colonial life and about their colony through this project, but the awesome thing is that they are also learning lots about the other colonies as well. At the very end of the unit, the class will be voting on which colony they would have wanted to move to, and my students are taking this very seriously. I have observed many students check out other students' posters or even get into arguments about why their colony is so much better. Love it!

I like the long-term reading project because students know exactly what is expected of them and are making some great reading comprehension progress as well as learning study skills. The tests are pretty hard and really expect a lot out of the kids, and each new test they rise to the challenge a little bit more. It is awesome to see kids' scores rise with each successive test. The long term project gives students the opportunity to continue working on the same skills, and you really get to see a lot of progress.

Of course, I also have grown to love these long-term projects for the benefit it gives the teacher. So much less prep!!! During my solo, I really only had to create daily lesson plans for math and writing. Because we had these long-term projects in place, I didn't really have to worry about social studies or reading, because I knew exactly which step was next, and all I had to do from day to day was make copies on time. That is a huge stress relief, especially because I was taking 10 hours of college classes after teaching all day, and had other responsibilities as well to worry about! Less daily lesson planning was such a life saver!

Free the Pee!

I can't stop laughing!!!

My students have really been abusing the bathroom privilege lately, with some students asking to go 6-8 times a day. Way too much!!! So last Friday, I added the Bathroom to our class prizes chart, and it now costs 3 tickets to use the restroom.
This was instantly effective. For the most part, students are now only going to the restroom during class once or twice a day if that, and many many students are now taking care to use the restroom during breaks, which they didn't bother doing before. If a student doesn't have the tickets, they are still allowed to go to the restroom, but they have to help pick up some trash in the classroom to "pay" for it.

Well, today, my students decided enough was enough! Within the course of about 5 minutes, they organized an entire campaign against charging to use the restroom. They made posters. They started a petition. But most importantly, they all started chanting "Free the Pee! Free the Pee! Free the pee!"

I am glad it was the last 5 minutes of class, because I absolutely lost it! I know I was probably supposed to keep a straight face, but I just could not stop laughing. The slogan is just so awesome!

The best part is, it leads up perfectly to the American Revolution, which we are teaching next week! Since last week, I have already been scheming about one day charging the kids to get a drink, to sharpen their pencil, to get a piece of paper, and to then launch into a "taxation without representation" lesson. The fact that my class is already so riled up about just the bathroom policy is perfect! I can't wait for Monday's lesson!

Pictures

Here are some pictures of the new classroom management aspects that I added during my solo. 

This is a picture of the group point system that I added onto our regular PAT points which is for the whole class. This allowed me to reward individual groups for doing the right thing even if the entire class didn't do it so well as to warrant a point for the whole class. It also worked the other way around, in that if only one group was being consistently noisy I could take point away from just them rather than the whole class. I think I only had to do that 3 times over the course of 2 and a half weeks, and it was extremely effective each time.

At the beginning of each day before school, I would put the number of tickets each group earned onto their desk, erase the tally marks and add them to the week sum in the right corner of each group. The group that earned the most points for the week was then rewarded by being allowed to both eat with me in the classroom as well as play regular games as well as some SmartBoard games. The kids loved it!

And here is a picture of the prizes students could buy. As you can see, students aren't told how many tickets each thing costs, and they must do the math themselves.

The kids love the prizes and so do I, because they don't cost me anything. I have since raised the prices on the Teacher's Chair and P.E. Activity because they were being bought too frequently and too easily (for the P.E. activity students are allowed to combine tickets). When the kids protested, I had a really fruitful discussion about Supply and Demand with them ;-)

The Teacher's Rolly Chair is definitely the hot commodity prize. My resident teacher and I have not had access to our nice cushy chair in weeks! We even have a week long waiting list on it!

Here is a picture of the Word of the Day, which I used for transitions especially. I always made sure to have really kid friendly definitions. One of my pet-peeves in education is that vocabulary is frequently taught with really hard to understand definitions! Just today, as I was passing out the pre-made textbook vocabulary list I noticed one of the words listed as "submit: to yield". If a kid doesn't know what submit means, I will bet you 100 bucks they also won't know what yield means! Is it really that hard to define it as "to give up or give in", which is actually something kids will understand?

Finally, and I don't remember if I talked about these, here is my stack of Interactive Journals for writing. This is something I learned and did in my UC Davis Teaching Literacy class. Basically, students are given the freedom to write about whatever they wish, and the teacher then reads and responds to every single entry. This gives students a purpose and an audience to write to, which really increases their motivation and output. I have kids writing me pages upon pages, and I have students who supposedly "hate writing" who eagerly ask me when the next time will be for interactive journals. They LOVE reading my responses to their writing, and I love reading what they have to say. I have noticed that it is a great tool for building relationships with my students. They feel valued and appreciated and are eager to tell me things about their lives. I have had students teach me about important customs in their culture, talk about a recent divorce, and other really deep things that I do not think would surface in the classroom otherwise. Really valuable!

Although they have free choice, every day that I do this (probably two times a week as other days we focus on actual writing lessons) I also talk about and introduce a new genre of writing, usually supplemented with sharing some of my own writing in that genre. I have shared a poem by Shel Silverstein and then shared my own rendition in a similar style, shared my own funny personal narrative, etc. This has really been helpful for helping my kids academic vocabulary in writing. Students are now freely using the words genre, nonfiction, personal narrative etc. in class discussion. Having a genre theme every day has also been beneficial for my "I don't know what to write" students, because then they just write in the genre that I shared that day.

Let me tell you though, Interactive Journals are a LOT of work!!! The first night, it took me about two hours to respond to every single student! Since then, I have modified a bit, and I only respond to 1/3 of the class each time, but then cycle through so everyone is responded to the same amount.

Yeah, that didn't happen + Lesson 1

I am laughing my head off now that I actually thought I would have the time or motivation to update this blog every single day of my 2 week teaching solo. Yeah, that didn't happen.
I was way too busy, especially since I still had my own classes from 4-6:30 most days and lots of my own homework assignments.

That being said, my solo went great! The whole thing ran really smoothly with no major hiccups of any kind. I had a honeymoon period with the kids for 3 days. Then on the 4th day, boundaries started being tested and my kids very much wanted to be holy terrors. But I cracked down on them by really enforcing the procedures (for instance sending the whole class right back outside again after a few students came into the classroom screaming), and they were all pretty well behaved again for the rest of the solo.

I did get some pictures from my solo time, and of course still remember mostly everything, so even though I missed out on blogging every day, I will be updating the blog with some stories of my solo in the next while.

For starters, I will be going over some lessons I learned over the course of the solo.

Lesson 1. Pre-test/Post-test/Pre-test/Post-test Always know where your kids are at!

I spent the first week of my solo reviewing previously learned math concepts at the request of my master teacher, in order to get the class ready for the Math Benchmark that the students took on Day 6 of my solo.

Because last quarter I was only in the classroom full-time on Mondays and Tuesdays, I didn't have the best understanding of what the class had accomplished in math. On the first day of review, I made the mistake of completely just relying on what my master teacher said about the understanding of the students instead of pretesting and determining that for myself.

So I rolled out with a great lesson on the sum of angles in triangles and quadrilaterals that I thought was awesome (because it included problem solving and conceptual understanding activities and succinctly summarized the whole standard in one lesson), only to discover in the first 5 minutes of the lesson that my class didn't remember ANYTHING on the topic and that the lesson was way over their heads. Of course this was also the lesson that my supervisor was observing me! Oh boy!

Well, everything ended up ok. I scrapped some things and took about 10 steps back on the fly, and improvised an extra 15 minutes into the lesson in order to really have the time to rehash the concepts and bring the class up to speed. Math went all the way to recess, completely skipping over the 15 minute Read-Aloud I had planned, but in the end we finished the lesson with the class having accomplished everything I meant them to do initially.

But I did learn my lesson! The next day, I came prepared with a second lesson on the same topic, but this time I also had two assessments. Right as the class came in for the day, I gave them a 4 item pre-test in order to determine exactly what they had gotten out of the lesson the day before. Then, when the class was at science (my prep period), I graded and looked at these tests and then adjusted my math lesson based on the misconceptions some students showed. Then I taught my lesson, and afterwards gave another 5 item post-test, to see if the lesson had been successful.

I'm not going to lie, I am still pretty proud of myself over that lesson! I feel like I really did everything that a real teacher does. Its really nice to hear about something in school and then to actually apply it.