Good day today. Not just saying that. I did small-group lessons in grammar with everyone - EVERYONE. Did Logical Agreement - Verbs and Random Placement - Verbs with 1st and 2nd years and Length of Action - Verbs with the 3rd years. It was GREAT. Know how I decided what to do? The new tracking software. Yep. Love that thing. I'm going to mail out progress reports here in a few minutes. Good times.
Had SJ bring in a student today. Project "Undermine the Authority" is officially underway. Not two seconds after she left the room I pulled my chair up to this kid and asked if he wanted to do something else. He picked compound dominoes, and he was DONE in a matter of minutes. Awesome! Then he did a vocabulary/spelling work. He was in my room for a half hour, and then we went back to his room. I told the assistant that he had done some great work, but that the work he came in with didn't seem to appeal to him all that much. She thought what he *had* done was great. SJ not so much. She said something about how he is resistant to copying work.
WELL OF COURSE HE IS!!
Gah! So annoying. Would YOU want to sit and copy lines of poetry for no other reason than your teacher told you you had to? No sir.
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Case Study
JS came in this morning and did the sentences on the board - without any prompting! Sure, she picked the one-star sentence, but she analyzed and symbolized the grammar correctly AND WITHOUT BEING HASSLED TO DO IT! Wow. Just. Wow. She later took a spelling test, which she passed, and then she spent some time doing math on the computer.
She came in with cool shades. I complimented her look, and then asked her to put them in her box. She did so without fuss. Same thing after recess. No drama, just, "please put those away." And yeah. Also, she has this tiny bottle (old bubble bottle?) that she keeps water in. She likes to take tiny drinks, but today she was leaving the room, and it was distracting her. So I told her that I might need to tell her mom that she can't bring it to school any more (in retrospect, seems kind of like I went overboard here). She kind of got upset and sputtered some half-sentences, seeming on the verge of a melt-down. I attempted to soothe the fuss, telling her that it wasn't the end of the world, when it came out that she hadn't brought it from home - it had been at school for some time. This is why the freak out - because of a misunderstanding of where the tiny bottle of water came from. I calmly asked her if she would mind taking it home then, and leaving it there. She assented.
She seems to have a strong sense of "things must be as they are." I slight misunderstanding - or even the wrong preposition in a sentence - and she'll become upset until the confusion is resolved. Even if the confusion seems insignificant to others - small things are important to this child.
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