Not a very typical week
This was, most definitely, an OFF week so far. It was one of those LOOOOONG short weeks. To be honest, the week started out great--nice and quiet! The students didn't have school on Monday, so that may have had something to do with quietness :-) After a staff gathering in the morning, we were given a nice chunk of time to take care of mid-year report cards. It was really nice to have that time!
Tuesday brought things back to normal, but not truly normal. Right now, the students are participating in district assessments to check progress from the beginning of the year. I have to say, the students have been doing a nice job overall with the assessments (but there have been a few that we didn't see the growth we would hope for), However, the testing does throw a wrench into the usual schedule. As a fifth-grade team, we decided to run the tests in the mornings, but that also means we need to shorten our class schedules down by about 20 minutes each in the morning. The result is classes that are only about 30 minutes long, and boy, do they fly by! This leads to several arrows being drawn in my lesson plans of things that need to be bumped to the next day (not that I'm complaining--I'd rather over plan than under plan. Plus, it means that I already have some of next week planned out :-) But even though there are a few arrows drawn in my plans, I was able to bring a little balance to the force in my classroom today. For the last few days, each science class was just a little bit off of the other classes due to any number of reasons (behavior issues, classroom discussions that go longer in one class than another, etc.) However, I was able to get all three classes back to the same spot today. This just makes me feel happy, and I'm calling today successful :-)
I was excited going into this week's lessons because the students were going to be using satellite data to track the movement of water around the US. After some background building the last two days (along with practice reading the data maps), the students will begin working in teams to graph one year's worth of data to track the changes in water in three US cities: Atlanta, St. Louis, and Portland (one city per class). Once each group's graph is done, we are going to line all the maps up and analyze the data. Having done some preliminary checking of my own, I think the students will be surprised by what the graphs show, and it will really hit home on the fact that we need to be more careful with how we use our water resources.
Well, that's it for this week--hopefully tomorrow will be as good as today was to give this long week a feeling of success!
Mindfulness thought for the week: No matter what you have or don't have, you can be a better you.
--Tom J. Deters, ProYou podcast
Tuesday brought things back to normal, but not truly normal. Right now, the students are participating in district assessments to check progress from the beginning of the year. I have to say, the students have been doing a nice job overall with the assessments (but there have been a few that we didn't see the growth we would hope for), However, the testing does throw a wrench into the usual schedule. As a fifth-grade team, we decided to run the tests in the mornings, but that also means we need to shorten our class schedules down by about 20 minutes each in the morning. The result is classes that are only about 30 minutes long, and boy, do they fly by! This leads to several arrows being drawn in my lesson plans of things that need to be bumped to the next day (not that I'm complaining--I'd rather over plan than under plan. Plus, it means that I already have some of next week planned out :-) But even though there are a few arrows drawn in my plans, I was able to bring a little balance to the force in my classroom today. For the last few days, each science class was just a little bit off of the other classes due to any number of reasons (behavior issues, classroom discussions that go longer in one class than another, etc.) However, I was able to get all three classes back to the same spot today. This just makes me feel happy, and I'm calling today successful :-)
I was excited going into this week's lessons because the students were going to be using satellite data to track the movement of water around the US. After some background building the last two days (along with practice reading the data maps), the students will begin working in teams to graph one year's worth of data to track the changes in water in three US cities: Atlanta, St. Louis, and Portland (one city per class). Once each group's graph is done, we are going to line all the maps up and analyze the data. Having done some preliminary checking of my own, I think the students will be surprised by what the graphs show, and it will really hit home on the fact that we need to be more careful with how we use our water resources.
Well, that's it for this week--hopefully tomorrow will be as good as today was to give this long week a feeling of success!
Mindfulness thought for the week: No matter what you have or don't have, you can be a better you.
--Tom J. Deters, ProYou podcast
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