Mostly Lots of Fan Emails

Officially my weekend lasts through Sunday. Unofficially, my weekend ends on Sunday afternoon, as I spend late afternoon and evening preparing for the week to come. Prepared is exactly what I must be to insure the most success for my students and the overall flow of the classroom.

The pressure has already begun to set in, as I am still trying to figure out what point I need to get these kids to, but even more, what point they are at right now and where I need to start. The school holds up the importance of pre-assessments right off the bat. We call them baselines, another NYC term that I've never used before but is now officially a part of my vocabulary. Last week the students started baselines in math (3 parts - the last to be done tomorrow) and completed baselines in writing.

This evening, as I read back over my half of the writing baselines, I was trying to compare the writing abilities of these students to the students I had last year. (I wish I would have done a no-instruction, no-help baseline writing last year.) Many of the students wrote about their summers and tried to squeeze two months of activities into a short writing piece. Of course, this led to sentences starting "And then... And then..." A few students did creative writing pieces where they made stories up. Although I didn't have many creative writing projects last year in my class, I'm looking forward to the set up of Writer's Workshop and the opportunity for more students to get creative with their writing and imaginations. I did have to laugh a little as I read the introduction paragraph to one student's creative piece:

One day in Oobi town their was this little girl named little girl. She was so rich and famous and smart, she had three babyies and 1 friend and mostly lots of fan emails.

*Note: The excerpt is typed exactly as the student wrote it.

I guess we've moved past the times of good ol' snail mail. In the technological times only fan emails are accepted!

O and I also enjoyed the piece about a boy's summer where he wrote about the end of a class field trip:

I took a van home and I also came home with a lot of books and a hat, with a whole pizza pie.

A whole Pizza Pie!? That's the kind of field trip I want to go on this year.