Politically Correct Me!

I feel like a politically correct nimcompoop. Why do I feel like this you ask? I feel like this because I haven’t really written down everything that has been happening. Firstly, I didn’t want someone from the district to discover this and I suffer harassment worse than I’m experiencing now. Secondly, some of this stuff isn’t about me. It’s about my students and their situations. I have to protect their privacy. Even though I know this, I still feel so politically correct. To me, politically correct feels false. I’m just going to have to tell myself that I need to bite my tongue a little. At least until I move on.

What’s Working For Me, part 2

Even though I observed in my class for a couple of days before I took the job, it was not enough interaction to determine their level. I have constantly overestimated their level. I tried to introduce them to the dictionary. Well, little did I know that they barely knew word sounds (phonemic awareness), so I scrapped the idea of introducing them to the dictionary and made them an ABC picture book. I took two pieces of cardstock, 26 pieces of paper with the words:

___ is for

(There’s a box right here for the picture)

______________________________________________________________________________________

—————————————————————————————————————————

______________________________________________________________________________________

————————————————————————————————————————–

______________________________________________________________________________________

Of course, we started with the letter “A”. I asked them what the letter was and what sound it made. I then asked them to tell me words that start with the letter “A”. I write those words that they give me on the board and have them draw me a picture of a word they choose. The next step is to look around the class and find words that start with that letter.

In the beginning they gave me words that just had the letter “A” in it. When that happened, I would put my hand to my ear and ask them what was the first sound they heard. By the time we got to the letter “D” they understood.

They were always surprised that a word that they used all the time started with the letter that they were looking for. Looking around the classroom served two purposes: My students cannot sit still for long periods of time so this allows them to have that multiple intelligences thing going on- they’re learning in different ways. Secondly, it lets them move around to their heart’s content (in a structured, controlled way). It’s a win-win situation.
After we are finished with this I am going to reintroduce the dictionary by having them make their own. After that, we are going to start working on word families.