Thursday,
January 14, 2016
My
day starts at 7:15am when I arrive at school.
I am the Math Interventionist for grades 2-5. I meet with my counterpart, the Reading
Interventionist. We’re working on a data
analysis from our latest benchmark, charting growth (or no growth) of our
students; so we share information and tasks that still need to be
completed. We also have a Student
Support TEAM meeting to prepare for so we share tasks for that too.
At
8:00am I attend a 4th grade Professional Learning Committee Meeting – We’re discussing what each content area is doing and how we can coordinate
our efforts to collectively prepare students to be successful in all areas.
At
9:00 am, I have 4 back to back 30-minute intervention lessons for 4th
graders and 3rd graders. Our
students recently took a Fall benchmark assessment on all of the math content
they’ve learned this year. The students
have created a SWAG report (graph of the questions they answered correctly
(green) and the ones they missed (red) by each Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills "TEKs". The graph gives them a visual of which TEKS they know and which TEKS are weak.
They each have a notebook that has their SWAG report, a blank benchmark, and their original benchmark. We’re reworking all of the
test questions using our campus-wide problem-solving strategies QFSA and RIJ:
We
are primarily focusing on interpreting and understanding what the question is
asking us to find. We read the
question. We try to see a movie in our
mind as we listen to the story problem situation. We draw a picture if we can. I’m discovering when students have a full and
complete understanding of what the question is asking, they can complete the
rest of the problem-solving steps independently.
At
11:00am I pick up my 2nd graders.
We are learning about double-digit addition. My students think it’s a
game to model the addends with unifix cubes by connecting the groups of 10 then
counting the tens and ones to find the sum.
It’s not quite as easy to move from the concrete unifix cubes to the
abstract algorithm. I begin showing them
the addition frame and we talk about how it’s similar and different to the
unifix cubes grouping that we’ve made.
While
my students and I are building, counting, using math terms to talk through what
we’re doing and I am asking strategic questions to lead my students to discover
regrouping, I’m being evaluated!
What?! And, our campus has a new
principal and she wants to observe the evaluation process so she’s observing as
well. NO PRESSURE!!
At
the end of our session, I return my sweet friends to their classroom and swing
by the cafeteria for a lunch salad. Some
of my 4th grade students have asked to eat lunch with me so they can
practice their math facts. They use
flash cards or play a game with a deck of cards (take out Kings, Queens, Jacks,
and Jokers, first) where each player turns over a card simultaneously and both try
to be the first to solve the multiplication of the numbers on the overturned
cards.
When
lunch is over, I send them out to recess and join an adorable first grader in
his math class. He
Is working independently adding and subtracting 1-digit numbers so I help
anyone in the vicinity that needs help by strategic questioning. Then I bite my tongue and wait as long as I
can – reminding myself that students learn when they talk and do.
At
1:00, I head back to my classroom for 2 30-minute back-to-back 5th
grade intervention lessons to solve our latest benchmark math assessment
questions.
At
2:00, I go to the TAP room
for professional development. Our campus is focusing on helping students
improve their writing across content areas.
Today we are learning about the DIG (Define-Identify-Give examples that
show a personal connection). process of
brainstorming before writing an expository personal narrative.
3:00
– 3:15. Bus Duty
3:15
– 4:15 Math Facts Club – students struggling with automatic recall of math
facts practice using games – card games, board games, computer games.
4:15
– 5:30 Analyzing recent benchmark data for my students. Have they grown since their last
assessment? As I discover weak TEKS, I drill down to specific questions that
were missed. Why did they miss? Do I need to reteach a concept? Or did students know the math concept but misunderstand
the wording? Did they only do one step
of a 2-step problem? Did they perform an
actual calculation when a problem required an estimate? Did they struggle to retrieve data from a
table, chart or graph to perform a calculation?
I drill down in detail so I can more fully understand the needs of my
students. My intervention time is short,
so I have to be intentional.
5:30pm
I go home, and like most teachers, I’m reflecting over the day's events - what went right? what went wrong? How can I modify to better meet the needs of
my students?
What's your day like? I'd love to know!
