Getting ready for standardized test.... In Kindergarten!

The Standford Assessment Test or SAT-10 as it is referred to locally will be in two weeks. We have been preparing since the beginning of the school year, but as we get closer to the event we tend to be a bit anxious to make sure we have prepared everyone sufficiently.

As I have reviewed the practice test, worked with the format and teaching how to listen better, how to read key words and other testing strategies I cannot help but feel that we are really preparing students for an educational life of standardized testing. Since we are starting now in Kindergarten these students will continue to be tested through each grade, their ACT, GRE, etc., etc. is this good? Will we actually be able to reduce testing anxiety? Will the continuous testing just become a natural part of education and become so much a part of the school year that it will loose this anxiety facing us?

I can only hope.

Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Dr. Seuss has inspired so many readers both young and old.

Here are a few quotes that have inspired me over the years and I've shared with my classes. They should be read periodically, not just on his birthday, but on those days you just need a good change i your view, a paradigm shift, or just a broad smile. 

1. Congratulations! Today is your day!
2. Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.
3. Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.
4. Only you can control your future.
5. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.
6. The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
7. Today is gone. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.
8. Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.
9. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
10. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself, any direction you choose.
11. You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
12. All alone! Whether you like it or not, alone is something you’ll be quite a lot.
13. I’m afraid sometimes you’ll play lonely games too, games you can’t win because you’ll play against you.
14. You can get help from teachers, but you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room.
15. So be sure when you step, Step with care and great tact. And remember that life’s A Great Balancing Act.
16. Words and pictures are yin and yang. Married, they produce a progeny more interesting than either parent.Be awesome! Be a book nut!
17. If you’d never been born, then you might be an Isn’t! An Isn’t has no fun at all. No, he disn’t.
18. Why fit in when you were born to stand out?
19. You are you. Now, isn’t that pleasant?
20. You’re in pretty good shape for the shape you are in. I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I’ve bought a big bat. I’m all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!
21. I’m sorry to say so but, sadly it’s true that bang-ups and hang-ups can happen to you.
22. It’s a troublesome world. All the people who’re in it are troubled with troubles almost every minute. You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot, for the places and people you’re lucky you’re not.
23. Christmas doesn’t come from a store, maybe Christmas perhaps means a little bit more …
24. A person’s a person, no matter how small.
25. I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.
26. Kid, you’ll move mountains!  Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So…get on your way!”
27. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
28. From there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere.
29. I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.
30. If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.
31. I’m glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone.
32. It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.
33. Look at me! Look at me! Look at me NOW! It is fun to have fun, but you have to know how.If things start happening, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along and you’ll start happening too.
34. I’m sorry to say so but, sadly it’s true that bang-ups and hang-ups can happen to you.
35. Things may happen and often do to people as brainy and footsy as you.
36. Oh, the things you can find if you don’t stay behind!
37. There’s no limit to how much you’ll know, depending how far beyond zebra you go.
38. Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So… get on your way.
39. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not. And will you succeed? Yes indeed, yes indeed! Ninety-eight and three-quarters percent guaranteed!
40. If you keep your eyes open enough, oh the stuff you will learn. Oh the most wonderful stuff.
41. It’s opener, out there, in the wide, open air.
42. Just tell yourself, Duckie, you’re really quite lucky.
43. You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut.Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.
44. In the places I go there are things that I see that I never could spell if I stopped with the Z
45. Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh, the things you can think up if only you try!
46. How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?
47. They say I’m old-fashioned, and live in the past, but sometimes I think progress progresses too fast!
48. Think and wonder, wonder and think.
49. Simple it’s not, I am afraid you will find, for a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
50. You’re on your own. And you know what you know… And YOU are the guy who will decide where to go.

A Pirates Life for Me!

My Kindergarten neighbor asked for assistance in motivating one of her students who just wouldn’t do any of the work she assigned to him. So she asked if I would observe him. I agreed, but I wanted to have him come to my room with work and let me observe him in my setting without distractions.

We worked on identifying items which started with the letter W – “worm” was one of the first pictures. My opening line was, “Do you eat worms?”

He looked at me like I was asking the dumbest question in the world. “No, “ he said. Then thinking, “unless they are gummy worms. I do eat them,” he concluded.

So he then immediately jumped from worms, to swordfish and pirates. I don’t understand the synapse link, but then he is in kindergarten and the mind works very fast.  We talk for awhile about swordfish and pirates. How the pirates would take the swords off the swordfish and use them. Even removing their eyeballs from the fish and using the socket to put their thumbs to hold onto the swords when they were fighting.  He went into great details.

At this point I now knew what we needed to do to help him with his work. He had no desire to work unless he had a motivator and pirates would be his motivator.

I told him that I had would look up a video on pirates if he would complete the work his teacher had left with us. Faster than, “shiver me timbers” his was working on the “W” sounds and had completed (with accuracy) all of the work and his hand was flagging me down as I moved from student to student. He didn’t shout he just waved. I checked his work and gave him a “high in the sky” hand slap (high fives can be confusing during math, so we use the other phrase.) We then moved to another table, I pulled out my iPad and found a movie trailer from Pirates of the Caribbean and we watched it together. He was mesmerized.

Not to lose the moment, we went back over to his regular classroom and he showed me the other work he needed to do. It was a lot, but I told him that if he would work and get it all done, correctly, I would read him a book that I had about Pirates and searching for gold (actually, A Pirates ABC’s). He did.

I checked the work, he did great. We came back to my classroom, we read with others in my class, but he got to point out items in the pictures about the pirates, the pirate ship and to call out the letters the crew and found on the island and in the ocean.  Then we were done.  He needed to have a continual motivator. He had only read the book once and wanted to read it again.

I said, “how about we take the book back to your classroom. Give it to your teacher, and when you have done your work and awaken from your nap, you can read it again, all by yourself.  He agreed. We did.

At the end of the day I visited to see how he had done. Teacher said he was a different child. He finished his work with fewer prompts the rest of the day and at the end of the day he had earned the reward to look at the book alone. Before leaving, he placed the book on the teacher’s desk and stated, “I will want to read it again.” To which she stated, “as long as you continue to do your work, then you can read it again, and again.”

I will check on him in the morning and make sure that he remembers.

Our favorite letter in the whole book? “Rrrrr,” of course.

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Tips for dressing a sensory sensitive child

Karen Wang, a parent, posted on the FriendshipCircle.org blog a great article entitled "10 Tips for dressing a sensory sensitive child".   

The article is helpful to parents and educators alike as the parents choose clothing and as the educators work with sensory sensitive students. Check out the complete article here. 

Mr. DDon

Helping Students to Name their colors!

Why Johnny Can't Name His Colors

The kid's are probably not color blind. Melody Dye has a great article and a trick for teaching children colors at a younger age--and why it is otherwise so hard for them. Check out the article: "Why Johnny Can't Name His Colors"  then remember what she has written. It is such a simple change for us to teach students, parents and others when talking about colors. 

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Great blog for "Little Minds"

Check out Tara's "Little Minds at Work" blog --- she has some great ideas and useful information for Kindergartners and other ages as well.  

I liked her information on Phonemic Awareness so I'm going to set the link for it:  http://littlemindsatwork.blogspot.com/2012/07/phonemic-awareness-and-phonics-101.html

Check out her blog today!

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Some of the best sayings...

       Each day that we work together my students will come out with certain phrases or questions that will just cause me to stop and laugh out loud.  I don't laugh at them as much as I laugh at the learning process. We all have processing delays, languishes, misunderstandings and yet we don't seem to express them quite as openly as my wonderful exceptional students in Kindergarten and First Grade. They are without filters and therefore we must take caution in how and what we say -- no matter whether it's in the classroom, the playground, the cafeteria, talking with other adults but within earshot of the students and especially cautious at home and from the media. They will learn and process back to us from all of the input they receive.

Here are some of the gems of this week... 

1. We are going to celebrate when we reach five days of 100% positive behaviors. We use www.classdojo.com to record our positive and negative behaviors. Each of the students see their individual scores and our daily percentage when we close out the day just before dismissal. On the day we reached our 3rd 100% day I posted a sign of the fast food choices for lunch, we could select, once we reached our 5th day. Wanting to use social studies as the lesson, I said we would take a "vote" on where we would choose for lunch.  Immediately one of the students raised his hand and emphatically stated, "I'm afraid of boats, please let's not take a boat. You just go through the drive-thru and bring it back, okay?"

2. We have been using fairy tales, nursery rhymes and fables as our reading materials to help the students be able to sequence events, identify characters, setting, select the hero and the villain. After we had read the "Shoemaker and the Elves" and then watched the book on video, I started asking questions about the story. All of the students were participating and raising their hands to answer the questions. We were all fully engaged on the story's setting, subject, actions, and characters. However, when I asked the question as to why the Shoemaker and his wife wished to make clothes for the Elves, a student who had not participated as much as the others quickly raised his hand. "Yes?" said I. "Oh, they wanted to make clothes for them since the Elves were butt naked!"

3. We were working on math stories in order to practice our addition and subtraction. I had made power point slides that were pretty sophisticated and the students were excited to see apples fall from the tree, to see the equation appear as they read the narrative of the math story. My last slide was one where three race cars were lining up at the starting line to run a race. Before we could read the first line of the story one of the students raised his hand and stated that his dad says that "race cars go so fast that it makes you pee on yourself."

4. When studying foods that we can eat without cooking, I chose to sing the song, "Herman The Worm" where Herman grows a little bit after eating each item the student says and then at the end he returns to his original size, because he "burps". Boys love it because the song involves sitting a fence post, chewing bubble gum, playing with my yoyo... but as we had moved around the table one morning, singing the song and stopping for each of them to state a food you can eat without cooking, one of my students on the autism spectrum was not very talkative. I repeated the phrase again, no response. I then gave him a verbal cue to see if he would repeat the cue, but again no response. One of my other students sitting next to the first one immediately stands, garners a look of terror on his face and points to the other student shouting, "Broken, Mr. Don, broken!"  Not loosing a step, I reached over the the student on the autism spectrum, touched the button on his shirt, restated the verbal cue, to which he then responded clearly, "carrots". The other student sat back down and stated, "Thanks, Mr. Don." We just moved on with another round of the song until all had a chance to participate. I smiled and winked at the one who was concerned about his classmate. He gave me a thumbs up!






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