#supporting students

In honor of the fact that many of us are home today, I thought it would be fun to do an Education Dare Day, so I figured I would start it.

A bit of background on my brag: one of the pieces of teaching that has been especially tough for me this year is having a cluster of ELL students in my room. Having a cluster means that I have three students who are still learning English. 

Anyway, it hasn’t been an easy few weeks since we got back from break. With state testing just a few years away, my students and I have both been feeling the stress. There’s always so much still to do, and never enough time to do it. We’re also trying to push through the rest of the end-of-year stuff, like taking a couple of other math and reading tests (because clearly having three state-mandated exams isn’t enough for these fifth graders and the county demands a few others). 

We just got the results of the first few tests, and I am so proud of my ELL kiddos! M, who has only been in the US since the start of 3rd grade, did so well on the math test that they took that she is eligible to be considered to take 7th grade HONORS math next year!

Best of all, though, is J. He’s had a tough year - earlier this year, his dad was arrested for assaulting his mom, and then he was deported in January, which took quite a toll on him. He had attention issues before that, but with everything happening at home, his mind truly wasn’t on school most days. He spent more time worrying about his little brother (just six years old), missing his dad, and wondering whether having only mom working would be enough to put food on the table. The last two weeks, however, he’s really been doing well. Somehow, he has made the choice to switch his focus more toward school, and his growth has been immense. When they took the end-of year reading test, he scored a 582, which is 200 points higher than he scored in September. This means he has made nearly two years’ growth in the last nine months and will be going to sixth grade only about a half-year behind where his peers are!

Every child has the right to an education and to develop their skills, talents, and abilities to their fullest extent. To assist children in this quest, over the years educators have developed new and different ways of teaching children with diverse needs to ensure they receive the support they need to succeed in their academic journey. In this article, we will explore some of the transformative…

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.