Dropping like flies...

I swear kids are getting sick left and right at my student teaching school. One of the 4th grade classes had 11 kids missing one day! We only have like 2 missing in one day, but they will miss half a week and come back, and then we lose 2 more for half a week. We had one boy just barely make it to school today before he ran into the bathroom across the hall to vomit. School hadn't even started yet. Then right after lunch another little girl walks up behind me and pukes all over the floor. Lovely. I can't do the whole puke thing. Even after 3 kids. I start gagging if I watch someone else puke. Puking is the like THE worst thing on the face of the earth to me. I can probably count on both hands the amount of times I've thrown up in my adult life. I avoid it at all costs. So today, when I could clearly hear what happened, I got up, walked forward and didn't turn around until she was done and it was all cleaned up. My contribution was pressing the buzzer and asking the janitor to please come to our room! Lol, I'm a wimp. We are on total clean down mode too at the school. We have had the nurse go around and give hand washing lessons. We have dozens of bottles of hand sanitizer int he room. We take hand washing breaks. I wipe the desks down twice a day with clorox wipes while the kids aren't in the room. I lysol all of their chairs and the room in general at least once a day. Today it was more like 4 times, lol. But they are still dropping like flies. Knock on wood I don't catch anything.

We have been having problems with the students either getting along too well (talking WAY too much) with their neighbors, or bickering too much. We have 6 groups of 4 desks. So yesterday I got the opportunity to create a new seating chart. So after school, I moved all 24 desks around all over the room, after spending a great deal of time trying to figure out which personalities I wanted together and which ones I didn't. Lots of learning experience. By the end of the day, I already had to switch a boy out, because him and his neighbor got along too famously! Trial and error.

So there are 2 philosophies (actually more, but I will focus on 2) on teaching readind. There are those teachers that put the kids into ability groups and give them names like the blue birds (for the top readers) all the way down to the crows (the slow ones). But everyone in the class knows they they are either the great readers or the slow group. UCO has told us all along in the education program that this is not the way to do it. You should have mixed ability groups so the lower kids can learn from the modeling of the more advanced ones, etc. The other group says no, you should stick them with those that can read like them, so that the advanced ones aren't stalled waiting for the slower ones, and the slower ones aren't dragged ahead too much by the more advanced ones. I suppose I can see the case for both philosophies. Anyways, this school I am at takes it one step further from in-class groups. They actually switch classes for reading. There are 6 4th grade teachers, and they each get an ability grouped reading class. And everyone knows which teacher has the highest group, and which has the lowest. They know where they stand. My teacher has the lowest group. We have 15 students, half of which are special ed. the other few are LD, and 2 of them are just poor readers. We do lots of low level stuff. I like working with the kids. There is one boy, who is a very large boy, a bit rough around the edges, who is VERY slow. He is LD, can't read much of anything, just makes up his own words when reading, words that don't even start with the same letter as the word he is reading. He can't write much of anything either. He is in constant action, lots of moving, twitching, hitting things with pencils or his hand, whatever. Verbally, he is sharp. The special ed. teacher, who joins us for reading class, tells me he is amazing with mechanics. She said his grandpa gave him an old truck to tinker with, and he works for hours, taking things apart, figuring out how they work, and putting it back together. He is fascinated with pencil sharpeners and will sharpebn a pencil alll the way down from a brand new pencil to barely a nub by the end of class. I think most of the teachers that deal with him just give up on him, and I think he knows this, which makes me kind of sad. Granted, he is a challenge to work with. It takes lots of patience helping him read and write, not to mention intense one on one time. And since he's a gruff boy, I think it's easier for people to write him off than if he were some little cute kid. I decided to use the pencil thing to my advantage and I brought like 50 unsharpened pencils to calss today. He was in my reading group (we break them into 3 for each of us teachers, ro give them more assistance) and we got done with our reading and lesson about 10 minutes early. This guy was already starting to break down, he wouldn't stay focused ont he story, kept hitting his housekeys onto his desk over and over while others were reading, etc. I asked him if he would mind sharpening some pencils for me. He perked right up. "Sure!" he says. I gave him a pile of pencils and he began. "I love sharpening pencils. It's really calming to my heart. And it's about the one thing I'm really good at and can do well." and I thought, ahh, how sad. Either he has heard people say that about him and he is repeating it, or he truly thinks he cant be good at much else, or both. But regardless, I wanted to use that to help him, to build confidence, to keep him focused and not disrupting the class, etc. He would make sure each pencil was good and sharp. Kids would come up and take a pencil from him as he would sharpen it, and he wanted to make sure they got the perfect pencil (I had an array of pencils, from halloween, to spiderman, to hannah montana, lol) and he would say "oh, so and so, you need this pencil" and would sharpen it just for them. And it made me happy to see him engaging with his classmates in a positive way, and feeling like he was useful, and that he could help other people. All for the price of a few pencils and a little patience. Yes, I gave myself a pat on the back today. :)