#intentional Times
for the week of Feb. 15, 2016
this week's events
Monday - No School
Tuesday - No School
Friday - IFs out in the PM for an IF meeting
Tuesday - No School
Friday - IFs out in the PM for an IF meeting
Are your students growing in small groups?
With almost a month of instruction since DIBELS and the reworking of everyone's small groups, now is a good time to start gathering data to see how students are progressing. While you've most likely been looking at this data on a weekly, even daily, basis, good practice says every 4-6 weeks is the time to reevaluate an instructional plan based on data over that time. This includes current PMing data, weekly assessments and any other formative data. When looking at each of your groups think about the skills that have taught in them and how students have shown their learning. Does the data show that students were successful in meeting the objectives of the small groups? If yes, are they ready to move on to a different set of skills? How will you incorporate a review of these skills so they don't forget them? Do groups need readjusting? If no, was there any growth? What was working or not working? How can I approach these same skills in a different way since it wasn't working? Do groups need readjusting? Please let your IF know if you would like support in this task.
Upcoming ILT Meeting
2/22 ILT meeting will focus on genre writing analysis. ILT reps - please make sure you have data ready to share with Ashlee no later than 8:45 on the 22nd and analysis notes to share with ILT that afternoon.
Who's doing the talking?
With ELPA season upon us, language abilities are up for assessment. How much did you prepare your students for this assessment since last February? One way to think about this is, who was doing the talking in your classroom? Of course, there is always a time and place for the teacher to be inputting information through direct instruction but the students need to be the ones doing as much of the talking as possible. Because of our population and sheltered instruction structure, we need to be putting structures in place for students to practice meaningful discussions/conversations. This means pre-planned questions, sentence stems/frames, collaborative conversation norms, precision partners, and much more. I have seen an increase in the amount of complete sentences without prompting in the upper grades (as I spend most of my time there) which is very exciting. How often do you students get to talk during each lesson? How many times are they speaking in complete sentences (with and without prompting)? How do you encourage this? I used to have the sign below posted around my room as a reminder to shut up and let the kids process! It might work for you, too. For every 10 minutes of input, 2 minutes of processing (verbal or written). 5:2 in Kinder and 1st. This is one of the 5 YSD strategies! Please let you IF know if you need support around this.
Potluck
Can you believe February is almost over? A potluck sign up sheet will be going up in the lounge this week for the potluck on the 25th. If you haven't contributed in a while, please try to this time around to give others a break. This month's theme is Pasta!