Some Updates

Here are a few highlights of my room, which is almost ready.

The teacher table now has blue and green dry erase wall pops, which the students will use to practice writing sight words. The "bulletin board" is actually contact paper on the file cabinets. Last year I used fabric but it didn't stay put. Notice the white stripe on the wall. I painted that to cover bare concrete.

The library is now color-coordinated for fiction and non-fiction. The back door is going to be a bulletin board highlighting "Character Traits" vocabulary. When we read books, I'll put up pictures of the characters with a trait they represent. The first day we're reading "First Day Jitters" and the vocabulary word is "apprehensive". Other words they are supposed to know are confident, mischievous, clever, fickle...You get the idea. One thing that I still need for this corner is a huge tub to keep the Big Books in.

This is my listening library. I'm pretty proud of it. I have over 60 books so far and the blue basket on the shelf holds 6 mp3/headphones for the kids to use independently. Notice how all the cabinets and shelves are white? Madeleine painted them at the end of the school year while I was passing out report cards.

This is an overview of the room. I bought the little bookshelves this summer for them to keep their supplies on. I'm hoping that this will keep them organized and we won't lose/misplace notebooks and folders as much.

That wraps up the tour. Two weeks from today this will be my home for 10 months.

Data

All summer I get excited about new plans, organizing materials, and buying too many books, bins, shelves, and even mp3 players for my classroom. Summer is a magical time when teaching is all in theory, before the reality of 6 year olds who don't always follow best laid lesson plans sets in. I'll post pics of my, almost ready, classroom later.

Today I woke up to this news story which basically slams my school district's test scores. You know how I feel about tests. Yuck! What a lot of people don't know is the level at which students have to perform in order to pass the TCAP. Read the "Corresponding Quick Score" below. Although it varies from grade to grade and subject to subject, most scores require a score in the upper 80 percentile or even a 90 or 91 in some cases. How many colleges or professional organizations require such a high passing rate?

Small classes, due to rezoning, resulted in my school's scores surpassing the districts by a huge amount. Our 3rd graders math rose from 40% scoring proficient last year to 71.1% scoring proficient this year. That means that 71.1% of our 3rd graders scored at 89 or higher on their test. That is amazing to me! The heartbreak is for those students who scored in the 85-88 range, who would have been proficient under last year's cut scores, but weren't under this year's higher score requirements.

I am interested in any other state's cut score requirements for passing. Maybe 90% is normal across the country. Pass along any info in the comments below. I looked at Indiana's data and saw for 3rd grade math there were a maximum of 735 point with a pass score of 413 (56.19%) and a pass+ score of  513 (69.79%). I may be interpreting that data incorrectly, but if not then Tennessee students are being held to a much higher standard than Indiana students.

Testing sucks. There is no other way to describe it.

Row Your Boat

The kids did their annual Gorge Row with CJR this weekend. Caleb took a video of the first portion, from the boathouse to Moccasin Bend, and then put it into time lapse. The video quality is better when I play it on my computer. It didn't translate to blogger as well. The original video is about 18 minutes, this video is only a few seconds. Altogether it took them about 4 hours to row the 23 miles downstream. They had beautiful weather for it.

Unfriending

My best friend

I was a very latecomer to Facebook. I pride myself on having "friends" from the whole spectrum of humankind. However, I "unfriended" my first person today. I was very sad, because this is someone who I get along with in real life, but I am tired of my Facebook being filled up with anti-Muslim, homophobic, Confederate rhetoric. If it was presented in an intelligent way I wouldn't mind as much. But it is very offensive and, for lack of a better word, loud. I'm a little ashamed of myself for doing the unfriending without having a conversation with this person, but it isn't someone I see very much any more.

If you are my Facebook friend, know that we don't have to all see eye to eye on issues, but we do have to be respectful of one another. 

One Month

On August 13th I'll welcome my new kiddos to "what I call" first grade. (Sorry about the Miranda reference; I've been binge watching.)

                    

Summer is the time for teachers to make all kinds of rainbow and unicorn shaped ideas for the upcoming year. With these happy thoughts we buy/create/plan extravagant learning systems. Above you can see the beautiful book boxes I've bought for my kiddos. I am sure that by May 2016 they will still be just as beautiful and not covered in crayon graffiti of misspelled curse words. See how optimistic I am in the summer?

                    

I have also bought some new containers for the library. Blue boxes are nonfiction and green are fiction. The kids actual do a pretty good job of getting the books put away correctly. Looks like I'm all set to start hauling things back to school in the morning.