April 17, 2013

Claire Matheson

'D' is not really making progress in his letters... He can write on his own, which is a step forward. The 'b' sound is still tricky for him.

Video:
Claire is sharing a video of D talking about B. She thinks they're bad, but they're actually fantastic. A+ in videography.

In the video 'D' demonstrated inattentiveness by looking everywhere except where he is supposed to. But, D was starting to use the classroom displays as reference material to find the letter B.

Interesting discussion: Using the short a in the word 'ball' it is different than in words like cat and hat... So it was slightly confusing between the short u and the short a sounds. D was able to find the letter B and write it. When asked to write a small b he wrote a capital B smaller (scale).

Claire is working on the initial sound with B.

Everything discussed in previous PLC meetings seem to be working.

Focus on the letters in 'D's name. Don't worry about the lower case letters...Unsure about the support at home.

Mike MacKenzie

Mike remains stuck with D & D. He really feels like progress is not being made. They are forgetting everything they learned in the previous bunch of lessons, so even though we review the lessons.

After trying a number of interventions, students are not making the progress that he'd like them to make.

After discussion, we have decided that they need to do a bottom-up approach to phonics instruction with an iPad app called Explain Everything used to include oral reading skills.

Tammy
The cards are hugely successful! Students are working on place value, and they are adding and subtracting by 10s, 100s, 1000s, and 1s. Only Do can go over the 9.

D doesn't understand thousands, he believes that there is only 1 digit in the thousands place. For example, he thinks that 12300 is 1 million 2 thousand, 3 hundred. Kids can do all sorts of shapes and can use the geoboard on the iPad. Students have a hard time drawing it, but can do it on the ipad. Students can count the sides of a figure and tell what it is.

Now students are working on perimeter with quadrilateral for the upcoming Lego Logic unit.

Next will be a focus on perimeter and adding numbers.

Bent
Talked about needing to work with a few students at a time for an entire month or so, instead of working with kids for 40 minutes once per rotation. That way she could focus on a number of things instead of 1.

Next time Mike & Claire will present something amazing. Must be incredible.