Students in action
Below, you will find some amazing book reviews! 4th grade reading groups in Mrs. Hurst's class completed novels from their reading groups. The students wrote, produced and starred in their own commercials. The students enjoyed reading and writing about the dilemmas the characters in their books face. I heard that Willy Wonka may have written the class a letter and may be planning a visit to Haskin Elementary!
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teachers in action
Haskin Elementary teachers met to discuss various aspects of reading instruction. Teachers looked deeply at the DIBELS Next measures for individual students. DIBELS Next are quick and efficient measures that indicate if a student is on track for reading success. Teachers took the time to identify students who need intervention support, evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and identify who needs support with the RTI/multitiered model. Additionally, teachers took some time to look at resources such as RAZ Reading, MyOn online text and Making Meaning. Great work team!!
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core beliefs in action
Quality planning, instruction, and assessments lead to high achievement for ALL students
I know from experience that it’s very tempting to let lesson planning fall by the wayside – it’s time-consuming, sometimes we don’t have the materials in advance of the lesson, and it involves lots of communication and face time with your co-teachers, which can sometimes be hard to come by. But we all know that lesson planning is essential. Our core belief, . Quality planning, instruction, and assessments lead to high achievement for ALL students, tells us that a planned lesson is just better. Not all planned lessons are fabulous and not all unplanned lessons are a disaster, but even a bad lesson will be less bad planned, and even a great lesson can be greater with a plan.
There are several reasons why a planned lesson is better. One of them is that having a lesson plan helps you maintain focus. With a classroom full of children, with their short attention spans and their natural desire to disrupt anything and everything, it is very easy for a lesson to be sidetracked or derailed completely, and the best way for the teacher to steer the lesson back on course is if you happened to have brought your map along with you.
Kids respond extraordinarily well to structure and regularity, and planning out your lessons gives them that structure. Kids respond to dead air in a lesson – to moments of uncertainty – by creating chaos. If you flounder at all in thinking about what to do, the kids will fill that time by escaping from the mentality of the lesson and into the mentality of play – from which it is often impossible to recover.
A lesson plan keeps you on track and keeps the kids on track, but it also helps outside the context of the lesson itself. Lesson planning lets you track progress and problems. With planned lessons, you have actual paperwork of everything you’ve taught, so you can refer back to it later. If kids aren’t learning a particular point, you know which lesson plan to amend, which helps you learn from your own mistakes and missteps. If kids learn something really well, you can look at that lesson and figure out what about it really worked. You can start to learn to be a better teacher overall and for each particular class, and you don’t have to do it via memory.
By the end of the year, instead of asking yourself if you’ve made a difference, you can point to a big, giant stack of papers – your year’s lessons – that show exactly the difference you’ve made for students.
I know from experience that it’s very tempting to let lesson planning fall by the wayside – it’s time-consuming, sometimes we don’t have the materials in advance of the lesson, and it involves lots of communication and face time with your co-teachers, which can sometimes be hard to come by. But we all know that lesson planning is essential. Our core belief, . Quality planning, instruction, and assessments lead to high achievement for ALL students, tells us that a planned lesson is just better. Not all planned lessons are fabulous and not all unplanned lessons are a disaster, but even a bad lesson will be less bad planned, and even a great lesson can be greater with a plan.
There are several reasons why a planned lesson is better. One of them is that having a lesson plan helps you maintain focus. With a classroom full of children, with their short attention spans and their natural desire to disrupt anything and everything, it is very easy for a lesson to be sidetracked or derailed completely, and the best way for the teacher to steer the lesson back on course is if you happened to have brought your map along with you.
Kids respond extraordinarily well to structure and regularity, and planning out your lessons gives them that structure. Kids respond to dead air in a lesson – to moments of uncertainty – by creating chaos. If you flounder at all in thinking about what to do, the kids will fill that time by escaping from the mentality of the lesson and into the mentality of play – from which it is often impossible to recover.
A lesson plan keeps you on track and keeps the kids on track, but it also helps outside the context of the lesson itself. Lesson planning lets you track progress and problems. With planned lessons, you have actual paperwork of everything you’ve taught, so you can refer back to it later. If kids aren’t learning a particular point, you know which lesson plan to amend, which helps you learn from your own mistakes and missteps. If kids learn something really well, you can look at that lesson and figure out what about it really worked. You can start to learn to be a better teacher overall and for each particular class, and you don’t have to do it via memory.
By the end of the year, instead of asking yourself if you’ve made a difference, you can point to a big, giant stack of papers – your year’s lessons – that show exactly the difference you’ve made for students.