#avmr

Last week was especially funky. We were off on Monday for Yom Kippur, so the kids were already a little off. I was also out on Tuesday for AVMR training, so my students started their week with a sub.

AVMR was one of many trainings and programs that I would have gotten a year earlier if I wasn't at the school I worked at last year. That list is growing regularly, and is an excellent reminder of why I left. AVMR in particular is a system that I am especially excited to start to use in my classroom. Based on 40 years of research originally out of Australia, AVMR is a system of diagnostic assessments and resulting tolls that analyze students' mathematical thinking and behaviors in order to determine where they are in their development of number sense. My school has been using it to guide intervention and to develop math IEP goals for students, so I've been vaguely introduced to the vocabulary before but I didn't actually know what anyone was talking about. I really enjoyed the first day of training and am looking forward to the remaining three!

Once I got back with my kids on Wednesday, we jumped right back into learning. To wrap up our unit on Virginia Geography this week, my students designed stickers that incorporated at least three of the five regions we studied. In math, we practiced comparing and ordering numbers using the Numbers Alive strategy, and in language arts, we started to develop character theories

My students had to take the math VGA this week, which is essentially them taking a shortened version of the previous grade's SOL again. It's pointless from a teaching standpoint, and the kids absolutely hate it. We had a very quiet party in my classroom when we had finished it, as that wraps up our fall testing for this year and we are in the clear until January.

I ended the week by starting our interim behavior reviews for the quarter. These reviews were something I started doing at my first school, which required us to complete an interim report for every child. Instead of spending hours after school completing them myself, I held a mini-conference with each student so we could fill them out together. I always found the conversations to be powerful for the students as well as myself - they were a great chance for the kids to reflect and set new goals, and it gave me insight to how their perceptions might not match mine in certain moments. One of my biggest troublemakers wanted to go first, and while it was a long conversation, it was also incredibly productive, with her setting two very specific goals to work on moving forward.