First Trimester Reflections

It seems that the first trimester has flown by, except for a few days that never seemed to end. At any rate, we will have finished one third of the year by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, and I want to do a little reflecting on some of the things I’ve tried this year.

As part of our Q Comp performance evaluation, we have to set a goal, and I decided to connect it to both the standards and one of our report card indicators. I chose nonfiction summary writing to work on, and so I did something I don’t think I’ve done before: I gave a diagnostic assessment with the intention of giving this assessment again once we had practiced the skill for a while. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before; I certainly assess prior knowledge before teaching, but I haven’t done it this way. I gave the students a nonfiction article, asked them to list all the nonfiction text features that they saw, and then to read the article and write a summary. This didn’t actually take very long, because nearly all students had no recollection of what either of those things were. I had one student out of my first group who wrote a passable summary, but otherwise most kids just stared at me.  I collected these from both classes, but I only used my first group for my goal setting.  We then set out to read a lot of nonfiction and practice writing summaries that included a gist statement, 3-4 sentences supporting the gist statement, and then a concluding statement. I gave the exact same assessment again, and once the students were done, I showed them what they had done with the diagnostic. It was great to see the kids be aware of how much they had learned in the five weeks we’d been working on this, and my favorite statement was one kid saying, “I didn’t even have a gist statement!” Gotta love that. Only two kids still have no idea what either the nonfiction text features are, or how to write a summary, but only six kids wrote a summary that I feel would pass the standards. On the other hand, with a little tweaking, almost everyone else would be able to do a decent summary, and we have the rest of the year to practice.

Another thing I’ve really liked is the Socratic circle discussions. Kids seem to really like doing them, and it is very clear who can participate in a discussion, who only wants to listen to their own questions, and who is afraid to speak. My goal is to figure out how to draw out the quiet kids so we get more participation.

My five-minute daily writing has fostered writing fluency, and I’m now starting to see more consciousness about capitals and periods. I’m going to stretch this into some Slice of Life writing next trimester, and hopefully it will be easier because they’ve been writing about things they’ve been doing for twelve weeks now.

I had kids choose a chapter book out of seven books that I put out, and required kids to read a third of the book each week in November. This actually worked well, as it has in the past, and many kids finished their books in much less time, and then asked to read another of the books I had set out. I will do this again in January, and leave December for books completely of the students’ choosing.

I started the year doing a read aloud every day, and that, sadly, has gone by the wayside. That’s my biggest disappointment of the year, in some ways. I think reading aloud for pleasure is so important, and I just can’t squeeze in the time. Maybe I need to reexamine my schedule and see if there is something I can flex, but with only two hours to a block, and forty minutes of that in guided reading, there isn’t a lot of time left for reading, writing, and social studies. I certainly read books aloud as part of the instruction time, but it isn’t quite what I want. 

How has your year gone so far?