He was good at math.....

I have been struggling to focus on math (and school) this week.  But today I realized that Tyler’s story is full of math connections.  Tyler struggled academically but was a passionate and successful lacrosse player.  His desire to play at the college level resulted in a switch to a small private school this year.  He had recently been accepted at a Division II school in California where he was going to play lacrosse.  Last week a car accident took his life and ended those dreams.

I remember the first time I met Tyler’s mom, it was at the parent meeting for lacrosse when our boys were high school freshmen.  We met in the coach’s classroom, he used to split his time teaching math and phys ed.  The coach was pretty intense and I remember he spit out a lot of statistics about his team.  Patty whispered to me that Tyler was not good at math and maybe the coach would be able to help him out.  I remember telling her to have Tyler check in with my son Aidan, he was a “math kid”.  That was before I knew all the ways you could be good at math.

Tyler had an amazing ability to see the entire lacrosse field and know where all his teammates and opponents were located.  He was a defender (like my son), but his talent for always being where the action was earned him a spot on the varsity as a freshman.  In addition, he was the guy to go to when you needed to restring your lacrosse head.  This is an art that requires patience, hand eye coordination and 3 dimensional visioning – a kind of puzzle.  This week, I learned that Tyler also knew all the starting NBA line-ups and their jersey numbers. 

He was a fabulous lacrosse player and he was good at math.  He will be missed.

Comprehension - next steps

S. is a confident 4^th grader who enjoys and identifies with being a reader and a writer.  She reads and writes at home for pleasure and she is supported by a family of readers.  S. reads different genres including historical fiction and adventure.  S. is fond of animals and her cats inspired the Fuzzball the talking cat story.  She has been known to create books to give as gifts and last year she gave her Mom a book for Mother’s day.  Her love of plays and acting contribute to her love of language.

The testing we have done to date, confirms that S. is a skilled reader.  On 1/25, we did a running record while she read The Mouse and the Motorcycle (grade 4.4 on the AR scale).  S. had 98% accuracy (based on 6 errors/300 words) and none of the errors affected meaning.  In addition, the QRI testing on 2/1 showed that S. read 139 words/minute putting her at the 75 percentile for 4^th graders.  In that passage on Amelia Earhart, she scored in the instructional range based on 7/8 questions correct.  She was also a 4 on the NAEP fluency rubric for qualitative measure of fluency and expression.  In her retelling, I scored it as a partial retelling (3) based on the 7 phrases she included in the recap of the story.

Regarding a lesson, I would like to take a deeper look into a story with S.  As Routman says “most students do not read deeply” and I have had glimmers that this might be true based on some superficial retellings.  In addition to the Amelia Earhart piece, S. has given us another retelling of a fictional story (Mouse and the Motorcycle) that was event focused as opposed to character focused.  I might base a lesson on character development and determine if S. can really connect with the characters and understanding why they behave as they do.  I would focus on inference to uncover if S. can read between the lines to understand a character’s motivations.  I have no information in this area.

My thought is to use Tovani’s double entry diary as an easy tool.  I would have S. fold a piece of paper down the middle and make two columns.  On the left would be specific quotes from the text with page numbers (alternatively it could be a summary of a section.)  On the right would be where she would write I infer…..  I would model how to do this out so that my teaching is explicit.  We could then do one together before letting S. go back to her seat to do more on her own.

Whoa!! Weebly, Wikis and Widgets ....

I know that the technology classes at UW Bothell are going to help differentiate me from other school's teacher candidates.  I am trying to embrace and learn technology so that it can help me be a better and more efficient teacher (and student).  It feels like slow going this week!

We videotaped our read-aloud lesson and it took some help from our master teacher to get the file onto my flash drive.  I smugly headed home with thoughts of getting "ahead" on an assignment.  Three computers later and although I can see the video, the sound is gone.  It might be just as well since the video itself has shown me that I have many lessons to learn.  I am still smiling.

I chose a "virtual field trip" for a social studies assignment and got completely lost in a rich and engaging website.  I was hoping for a developmental opportunity as I do not gravitate to digital resources.  Next time I will either just head to a museum or I will plan for more time to mine the web for information.  I am still smiling.

My home scanner would not cooperate and so I headed to my local Kinkos to scan some old photographs for my digital vignette. I missed half of one of my kid's soccer games trying to figure out how to use the scanner and get the photos onto my flash drive.  I am still smiling.

I have struggled with unit plan templates from two different sources. One is a pdf file that I cannot copy or write to and another is a Word document that causes me difficulty when my lesson is longer than one page.  I spent WAY too much time and ended up creating a new template.  I am still smiling.

I did the Weebly tutorial as I knew that I would need remedial assistance for this assignment.  I think I finally created a portfolio with a link on our Wiki.  I am still smiling.

My own blog now has links to my blogging circle and I have managed to figure out how to comment on all of them.  Now that I have seen a lot of different blogs, I think I need to mess around with some Widgets so that my blog is easier to read and navigate. I am still smiling.

I cannot imaging doing this week's Literacy Running Record without a recording device.  That means that I will need to borrow and use more new technology.  I am still smiling.

Wish me luck!