Time to regroup

I spent the afternoon at a second grade at Lacoochee Elementary School where I returned the twice fired and glazed lumps of clay the kids had lovingly made. They were excited to see how shiny and wonderful their pieces now were. This was their first foray into ceramics. The kids who settled down and actually produced things and carefully glazed them had many finished pieces. The kids who weren't there or had been yanked out to do special tutoring, or just couldn't get down to the task, had little to show for it. Natural consequences.

Each week we have been studying insects, capturing them, looking at them. When I get there to the class they always have something interesting to tell me or show me. Today it was a praying mantis eating a small grasshopper. "Gross!" This is a lively class of about sixteen kids, very doable. Sky, the tiny seven year old has captured a dead rhinoceros beetle. She can identify it and is pleased about this.

We play several rounds of Hangman and I am appalled at the lack of word skills these kids have! Maybe this is partly because I have always taught somewhat older kids, but shouldn't second graders at least know that every word has a vowel? (Forget rhythm) And consonants? I give the kids hints, discuss vowels and consonants. So we go on. Next guess? "Z", says Miguel. I explain that if you see an NG at the end of the word, it's a good bet that you need an I before to make ing.

After a while I see that four of the kids are actually focusing and can make pretty good guesses. One kid, Xavier, has a pretty good overview and tries and succeeds in predicting the word from the clues. In this activity every child was on task and interested.

I often browse around this classroom and see the lovely and unconscionably expensive reading materials from FCAT. The words and directives these things use are of no interest and use to non readers such as these kids. I also see magically interesting big drawings on paper their teacher has them do for literacy and math. These things and the attention to the bugs in the science are what grabs these children.

The rest of this post, the political part was stolen by Hughes Internet.