Day

This week has been alright. My kids have come back with a better focus, for the most part, and I have seen across the board improvement.

One student did move. Kaydie told me that she would move to West Helena, a big move in town. Now she goes to Beechcrest. She was one of my better students, but could have a slight attitude. Now her cousin, who used to be her next door neighbor is saying that he is moving. This takes my total to 19.

1. Xander may have internalized the strategy of stretching out words to figure out the letters to write for them. In a little conference I asked him how he could spell a word and he said, "stretch it out," in his cute little way.
2. Most of my kids seemed more concerned about the flow of activities in the classroom. I'm hearing more kids use kind messages and requests. They have even said things like, "May y'all please be quiet in here." Really interesting turn of events in my class.
3. I've gotten my kids to say that they really like words like delicious and diabolical and horrible. We've been talking about describing words and adjectives during writing. Hopefully next week we can start to incorporate them into our writing.
4. I did a reading level check on one student. Tak completely blew me away. in an above level book, she read it at about 100 wcpm. Standards say at the end of the first grade they need to be at 40 wcpm. She was also reading a book that was at about a mid-second grade level. She has surpassed her reading goal for the year and now it needs to be bumped up. I hope I can find more encouraging news as I go through the other students.

All in all it's been a good week back.