Just a reminder, next week we will be hosting Carrie Brockway from Box Cars and One Eyed Jacks. Carrie will be showing us fun ways to challenge, motivate, and engage our students in literacy!  She will show participants how to use games as a teaching strategy and why it works!!!!!  

   

 Limited seating is still available. Let Stephanie know ASAP if you are interested!

Literacy Workshop

Wednesday, October 3, 1 - 3 p.m.

Pre K - 2, Autism, CD

Wednesday, October 3, 4 - 7:30 p.m.

Grades K - 4th

GCSEC

CPDUs Provided

Model Drawing

 Jean Ann and I have taught two thirds of our Model Drawing class. If the class runs three Tuesdays, how many classes are left?

You got it! One Tuesday left!!!!  But, can you show it to me to prove your answer with an extended response? The teachers attending our class can do it easily.

Many of our students (and teachers as well) feel this way about word problems.

  What is Model Drawing? And why are teachers coming to do word problems for an hour and a half after teaching all day? Model drawing breaks down story problems into manageable steps that allow students to "see" the answer, bridging the gap between concrete and abstract concepts.  The strategy uses the same steps from kindergarten all the way up to high school and beyond.

Using the same problem, students in your classroom can go from drawing simple boxes to algebraic equations in the blink of an eye.

Attendees from ICS, Nettle Creek, & Aux Sable work on solving word problems together!

Armed with pencil, paper, and chocolate attendees will be ready to face our final class solving rate, ratio, percentage, fraction, and multi-step problems!

Yippee!!!

Camp Read won a $2,000 grant from Target to be used for reading materials to be put in the hands of our campers.  Every camper will receive books of their choosing to help create a library at home. Each year Target gives educational grants to K-12 schools and nonprofit organizations and we are very pleased to have been chosen.  Applying was easy and painless, and the end result was fantastic!  Grants are given in the amounts of $250 - $2000 and we got the $2000!

So true!

Benchmarking Madness!!!!

The last two weeks have consisted of your friendly neighborhood GCSEC curriculum specialists bouncing from school to school across the county helping out with benchmarking.  I can now safely state, I have every first to second paragraph of every fluency benchmark passage memorized.  So if you're ever curious about Charlie Clark and his postal route, how the mountain and river were bitter rivals, or jellyfish and their plastic like bubble tops...just let me know. I'll recite them for you.

We also hear the same mistakes stated over and over, lump of grass instead of lump of glass, big bay bridge instead of big bay ridge, not fallen yet instead of not yet fallen among many others. My personal favorite is testicles instead of tentacles.  Jean Ann had a student furiously apologizing to her through out his timing once he realized his mistake.  He'd read a sentence "I'm so sorry" read another sentence "I'm really sorry", and Jean Ann being the model of standardization waited until he left the room to bust out laughing. 

I've learned a couple new tricks the last few weeks.  

1. Laptops are faster than iPads. 

  I used my laptop exclusively, Jean Ann would switch back and forth between her laptop and iPad.  Both of us noticed the laptops' increased speed navigating between pages, and overall the laptop seemed  not to "clitch up" as much as the iPad.

2. Safari and AIMSweb are frenemies.

   For the most part AIMSweb will work in any web browser you choose. But there have been issues with Safari not recognizing passwords, or not interacting fast enough with the browser based scoring.  If you simply switch to firefox, chrome or any other browser you should be fine.  On an iPad you will have to download the app for that browser. (I personally recommend chrome)

3. Stop and reload.

   Some of us have had an issue setting up our progress monitoring schedules.  Once everything was loaded it wouldn't give the assess now option for fluency passages.  (This is the most awesome perk of AIMSweb right now!!! It must work!!!) The only way I could find to fix it was to file those schedules and start over.  (YUCK!) Luckily both teachers who had to deal with this are AIMSweb ninjas and did not have any data other than the initial score in for students, so it wasn't a major dilemma.  If this happens to you, LET ME KNOW, and I will stalk AIMSweb for some answers! 

As always, contact Jean Ann or myself if you have any questions!