Back to School

I hate the first two weeks of school--thank goodness it's over and I'm good-to-go until the last two weeks of school (hate those, too!). I intended to post sooner than this, but it's been a very hectic time for me. My roster has settled down and the remaining class is fairly balanced: 12 boys and 9 girls. Of course, some of those boys are really like having 2 boys, since they never sit down or do any work so my class is really more like 17 boys and 9 girls. :) Still, not as bad as last year's group. I do wonder what they do at our sister-school (k-3), because it seems like not a whole lot of teaching has been going on.

Really--shouldn't 4th graders be able to get out a pencil when directed to do so? Or have their "pen in hand, ready to check" their paper? When I say these things, I get blank looks. So I've been explicitly teaching everything imaginable and trying so hard not to be sarcastic about it. I have succeeded at that but sarcasm is one of my great character flaws, and I constantly strive to be less brusque and more, umm--human? Anyway, less of what my natural tendency is. I am a good teacher, my students come to appreciate me (even love me), but I can be a little too no-nonsense (but that's not always a bad thing).

One constant daily frustration is our Social Studies notebooks. A few of my students are doing a wonderful job--notebooks lovingly decorated and well-maintained. Others--well, explicitly showing and telling and using my doc camera to really show and tell has had no effect on them. Their notebooks are irreparably screwed up--papers glued in just any-old-where, incomplete, and just plain wrong in so many ways. Oh--the angst! And I've tried so hard! I gave up on talking them through taking notes--even when I write them on the doc camera as they watch, they can't keep up. Even with looooooooong pauses. After spending 3 days on Lesson 1 (and our curriculum map says "1 day" for that lesson), I knew I had to make some changes. Now, I provide a notetaking frame. It's basically cloze sentences, written with one eye on continuity (history is a story) and the other eye on the chapter test (so that it is also the study guide my 6 students with IEPs need.) I spent a couple of hours writing these for the next 2 chapters. Here's an example:

Chapter 1 Lesson 3
The Rise of ___________________
1. The ___________
• The Mayan ____________________ developed about
_____________ years ago and lasted until about the year
_____________.
• The Maya were extremely successful _______________ and
eventually produced a _______________ _of food.
• Because they had a _________________ of food, some Maya
began to ______________________.
• As a result of the Mayan study of the movements of the
____________, ______________, and _______________, the Maya
developed a highly accurate ________________.
2. The _________________ and the __________________
• The ______________ civilization developed in about the year
_______________.
• The Aztecs settled in the Valley of ________________ where
they built the great city of _________________________.
• The Aztecs got more ______________ for _______________ by
creating floating _________________, carving terraces in
___________________, and developing __________________
systems.
• The Aztecs extended their borders to reach from the
______________ to the _______________ oceans by conquering
other peoples in the _________________ of Mexico.
• At the same time as the ______________ ruled central Mexico,
the _______________ Empire rose in South America.
• The Incas built thousands of miles of ____________ to link all
parts of the empire to their capital at ________________.

I don't just give them this notetaking frame--we read and work together on it. They locate the lesson title, section names, etc. in the text, then we read the first cloze statement (they are sequential) and listen to the cd recording of the text to hear the answer. Hands shoot up, the answer is found in the text, and everyone records it. Or, so I thought. I don't record it for them. Not even on the example on display on the doc camera--heck, I've done everything but that. But, incredibly, quite a few want me to do that, too. Um, no. The answer is in your text. Find it.

Oh, and next time I make a batch of these frames, I'll replace the bullet point with A. B. C. listings--they just can't handle those bullet points.