Take Over Week Begins!

11/15/10

Take over week begins!

I arrived at school at 6:45 this morning - up at about 4:30 - ready to go!  I finished my lit review last night (finally)!  I feel really good about it - I found a great article that explained the history of mastery.  Turns out that Bloom (of Bloom's Taxonomy) created a mastery model as well.  When I was reading the mastery model, I could have sworn that I was reading about PLCs!  Turns out, they're just a modern day rip off of his mastery model of frequent assessment, direct instruction or enrichment, improvement of instruction based on assessment results, and a final assessment after direct instruction to make sure that all students are back on track.  Brilliant!  Bloom theorized that nearly all students would achieve mastery (usually set at 80% or above) of a given topic.  Much better than the typical bell curve!!  With my casual observations thus far on the PLC process, I think that Bloom was correct!  I have been amazed at how much students improve with just a 30-60 minutes of additional direct instruction.  Students who were struggling with a concept on the first assessment, pass the second assessment with flying colors!

In Language Arts, I finished up the "A Play" Inferring lesson with students.  After we completed the T chart, I explained to students their new response log topic...surprise!  It's inferring!  This new assignment will actually make it much easier for me to go through and grade their work - much less commenting necessary!!  This will be good because I have a busy week!!

In science, I let the students know that they were not going to work on quiz boards this week.  I knew that they would be bummed, so I had them do a 3-second-group-moan to get it out of their systems.  That was a big hit!  I explained that it was my take over week, so they were going to learn about weather and Ms Wink would continue with quiz boards next week.  

We played "Weather Scattegories" which ended up being a big hit!   Students were given the letters WEATHER on a large grid - they needed to think of as many words related to weather as possible.  They had 3 minutes to work on their own, 2 minutes to work with a partner, than 1 minute to work as a table team.  At the end of the time, I had students share their words and I wrote them up on an overhead of the sheet that they had.  The students loved it!  

I then gave them a pre-assessment and stressed that it was just to help me to know what to teach.  No grades, just information gathering.  After reviewing the assessments - I noticed that many students were not able to explain the difference between climate and weather - I'll make sure to emphasize this in my vocabulary presentation tomorrow.

Overall, the day went really well!  After school, I went over to BC and churned out three pages - not bad for having woken up at 4:30 am!