Week five. This week on Tuesday morning I helped sell raffle tickets. The students are doing an adopt a musher program, to support the UP200, in which they can buy raffle tickets for fifty cents apiece. The prizes are things like stuffed animals. The musher comes to the school and gives a presentation before the race. The older students bought tickets before the class bell, and the kindergarten students came down as a class to buy paws. (The raffle tickets look like dog paws) Most of the students that saw me did not know that two quarters was fifty cents. A lot of them had their money in an envelope that they gave me. This was a good opportunity for me to interact with some of the students from other classes that I have not had a chance to see yet, and also it was good to see how much they understood about money.
For the rest of the morning when I got back in the classroom the students were doing centers. I was happy that I was able to see the intro to the centers. Groups of students are all assigned a different color shape which, these shapes are put in a chart that shows the students where they need to be. The center that I was facilitating had a worksheet with times on an analogue clock. To help the students I had the classic big clock with gears in it, which is very cool and hasn’t changed since I learned to tell time. As expected, some understood a fair amount about telling time, and other did not. The worksheet only had times at the top of the hour, and half past. These expressions are foreign to them and I struggled to create a solid way to connect “O’clock” with writing the digits, :00, in a digital display. Someday I will think of a great device, or I will ask an experienced teacher for a strategy.
On Thursday of this week we returned to the same class for writers’ workshop. The student teacher did a great job on her mini lesson “what to do if you don’t know how to spell a word. “ The student that I approached during the writers’ workshop gave me the impression that he would rather read a book since he was done with his story. I was sensing that he was feeling shy so I waited for him to warm up to me, then asked to see his story. After reading it I gave him positive comments about the story’s strengths. He was pleased with this but wanted to continue reading, so I waited more. When he was done with his predictable book I asked him if I could make one very small suggestion about a mistake in his story. He reluctantly put the book away and allowed me to point out to him that he had done a great job by capitalizing his own name in the story, buy why didn’t his friend deserve that same designation? At this point he was thrilled that all I wanted him to do was change one letter and he did so diligently. I continued to show other places that capital letters should appear, culminating on the idea that when using I to talk about myself the subordinate will never do. Our workshop time was spent productively and I think that student will be less shy the next time we meet.