Prior to each conference teachers review student's self assessment, data and work as we think about a child's classroom program, challenge and success.
It's interesting to note that every child is so unique calling forth different goals, strategies and focus. I find myself thinking about best practices too--what really works for this child and how can I shift the schedule to include other practices that will benefit his/her development. As mentioned before, this becomes an intricate math problem of time, priorities and variables with 25 students, many standards to teach and children's interests and needs to respond too.
What practices do you use that serve children well? What practices do you want to strengthen and institute with greater consistency and purpose?
As I assess student data, I find that the following practices served children well this year.
- Multimedia Compositions, Special Projects: Many students enjoyed these projects particularly students who, in the past, have struggled with straightforward, paper/pencil writing projects. These projects also excited creativity, built community and developed reading fluency skills.
- SumDog: Students started using this program over the summer months. They really enjoy this online math practice site and I've noticed increased skills due to this engaging practice.
- Symphony Math: Our math leader instituted this online math software program with a grant. Last year during the pilot, I wasn't too happy with this. Yet this year, with greater consistency, I am recognizing the strength of this program. Symphony adds a missing component to our math program which is essentially a "grow at your own rate mental model math program." Some of my math challenged students need more one-to-one help to get started with this program, and I hope to provide this in the days to come.
- Lexia: Similar to Symphony, Lexia is a grow at your own rate online reading program. I want to use this with greater consistency as I've noticed that teachers who use it have greater success with specific reading skills. I plan to institute this more as the year moves forward.
- Regular Fact and Computation Practice: Students have been consistently practicing facts with programs like SumDog, Xtra Math, That Quiz and others. We've also been using in-class lessons, projects and paper/pencil practice. Regular, weekly attention in school and for homework is serving students well in this regard and supporting greater understanding and progress in higher level, math concept units.
- RTI ELA/MATH: RTI is helping us to serve small groups and individual students with specific needs better. We have a good pattern in ELA and we're building a pattern for math. I have seen some good progress from these efforts and look forward to continued growth in this work.
- Rotations: Our grade level rotates for specific topics--students move as a class to other teachers. Some students really like this and others don't. I want to think about how we can continue this practice and better match our efforts to students' needs. It might be that we include specialist teachers in these rotations so that some students rotate to smaller, skill-based content rotations while others rotate to larger similar skills/content rotations.
- Read Aloud: This creates great classroom community and terrific literary discussions. Some students report that this is a difficult time of the day for them. Typically those are students with auditory issues. This also might be an area where some students travel to a small group read aloud group with a specialist teacher.
- Small Groups: Students really enjoy working with small groups. Building in more time for this in all areas of the curriculum will boost student academic growth.
As I write this list, I realize that there are many practices that help us move students forward. This list represents some of the most important efforts at our grade level. I'm sure that I'll add more as I think about this in the days to come.
