Day 28 - Getting caught up

Today was a pretty good day with first period. This morning, one of our school's ESE/maybe psych. specialists came in with her intern to introduce some new strategies for studying vocab. She showed the students a website called Quizlet.com which is really pretty neat and I will seriously consider using it in my own future classroom. Basically, the teacher and/or the students can use the site to create vocab flashcards and play games to study and master the words. I hope some of the students actually use it, if not for this test coming up, then in the future. After that, we did an activity called quiz-quiz-trade. We took the normal structure and made it our own to suit the characteristics of our large and sometimes chaotic classroom. Here was the gist of it:
- The students were split into two groups of 12. One group stood in a circle and the other group matched up with a partner and you end up with an inner circle and an outer circle.
- Each student received flashcard with a vocab word from chapter 15, on which they are being tested this week.
- In their pairs, the students take turns quizzing each other on their words. The person in the inner circle goes first, then the person in the outer circle.
- We gave the pairs 30 seconds to do this. When they heard the chimes of the timer going off, they swapped flashcards and the inner circle shifted over one person to their right and the process repeats.

They caught on pretty quickly and we repeated it somewhere between 5 and 8 times, and ended just before the activity would have broken down due to the students' waning interest. Quiz-quiz-trade is normally a much more free form activity, but we have a large group of students. We probably could have worked the logistics better, so I have no idea if they got anything out of the activity, but it went alright and I would consider using this again in the future if I modified it for even smaller groups of students.

We spent the next few minutes going over the review packet and then spent the rest of the period working on the essay posters. We did not finish with presentations, so that gives us plenty to do Thursday morning before the test. 


With all the business of preparing for this week's test and such, Carrie and I fell a little bit behind in updating our students' grades. We had almost all of their work graded, but we hadn't put it in the paper gradebook or the online gradebook yet. There was a giant stack of papers to be put in, but we developed a good system: I made sure it got in the paper gradebook and then Carrie updated it online. It was such a relief to get all caught up on that. And lo and behold, almost all of our students got A's on their last quiz! I was shouting with joy in our empty classroom this afternoon. Granted, there is no excuse for any student to get below an 80 on their open-note journal quizzes (because we take 8 out of 10 questions from the work they are supposed to have done in their journals), but to have nearly all A's was a great feeling. When quizzes make up 40% of the total grade, a good quiz score makes a huge difference for some students.

And in semi-related news, I registered this evening for my last required teacher test! I might still take at least one more, but this is the last test I am forced to pay for, haha.
Send happy thoughts my way on March 12th at 2:30pm!!