Survival Skills Unit...all done!

Holy cow!  We finally wrapped up the Survival Skills unit.  We had our celebration today.  The kids who wrote plays performed them, then the kids put their projects out and wandered the room looking at each others projects.  I love the buzz that hums in the room during these celebrations.  The kids who are on task get excited to see what their peers created.  I see a lot of shy but proud smiles when they receive praise.

There are still some kids who did not finish (even thought they were given three weeks to complete it).  During the next science choice board homework for the environmental changes unit, I will be sitting in a small group during the academic contract planning time with those students so we make sure they are organizing their time.

After we were done with the gallery walk, I had students place their compliment stickies in their science journals and respond to the following: Discuss how you feel about having a choice for project type and explain why you feel that way.  I encouraged students to consider writing, whether or not they like choices, are there too many/not enough.  I haven't read their journals yet but I'm eager to find out if their responses were similar to the reflection they did on the reading unit.

Speaking of the reading unit...today was day 3 of Unit 2.  I am really enjoying the unit.  My read alouds are off.  I should have started another character book by now.  We just finished Junebug by Alice Mead.  It's such a great character book but I need to start another.  I just can't seem to decide on one!  I realized that beyond the read aloud I choose, my classes had no shared reading.  So now, on Mondays, we read the story out of our reading adoption.  I then use that story and the skill lessons in my small groups.  It makes planning my small groups much simpler, gives us a shared text, and the kids get to hear a story that uses our vocabulary.

My inquiry this year has to do with vocabulary.  I noticed that my ESOL student's vocabularies are very limited.  My wondering question is: How will using American Sign Language (ASL)  in conjunction with Reading Instruction affect my ELL student’s use of fifth grade level vocabulary words?

I am using ASL to teach my vocabulary and during my reading lessons.  I created a pre-assessment for my five ESOL students to take.  I will meet with these students three days a week for small groups.  Two days a week we will focus on vocabulary.  I just got their FAIR data and these accomodations seem appropriate for their areas of weakness.  I will use this data and weekly vocab quizzes on Portal as my hard data.  I will give students a survey to find out if using ASL had an effect on their confidence using more complex words.

Overall, things continue to go well.  The afternoon class continues to be a challenge.  The kids came up with a strategie to help some of my student monitor their distractive behavior.  Four of the students put a peice of masking tape on their desks.  Everytime they disrupt the class they get a tally.  If they have fewer than five tallies, they get a Parker Pay ticket for the day.  If they have five or more tallies, they have to move their conduct stick to Rookie (or Cadet...depending).  Our goal is that they become more aware of how often they are being disruptive so they can adjust it.  One of them really struggled and got frustrated with me when I kept "catching" him off being disruptive (as if you could miss it).  However, two of my students were less disruptive than they have been in a long time and earned their Parker Pay.  The fourth student had exactly five and didn't get his pay.  I'm hoping after a while we can lower the tallies to under three or >3.  Then...eventually we wont need it.  I hope.  What's really nice is their classmates came up with this...not me.