Leveling

L was out on Friday, so we couldn't finish preparations for leveling*... so much for starting the new classroom with the new week. Ah well. It'll probably happen by Tuesday... and it'll give me that last day to finish my DRAs. I forgot when I was doing them that the "high" kids are just as important as the "low" kids... I may have to trade one boy back from L and give her a girl, because she's probably too high to be in my class. He's borderline (I/J reading level) but given the involvement of her mother and her mother's insistence that her daughter loves to read and went to the library frequently, I'm betting she's at least a K by now.

This is all massively frustrating. There are lots of things (introducing the job chart, organizing guided reading groups, putting name tags on the desks) that I don't want to really get into until I have a moderately stabilized classroom... and as I said last time or so, I'm sort of feeling like I wasted the first week of getting routines underway and getting the kids settled since we're going right back into upheaval. I guess I could think of it as an opportunity to try it again and see if I can do it better... but the problem is that the core curriculum goes into full force this week, and I don't have the extra time in the mornings anymore.

I was about right about numbers, though. I'm losing two Cs and two Ds off the bottom, and two Js off the top, and gaining six Is and six E-Fs. This will give me, according to my current plan, four teams of five and one team of six (this makes more sense than four teams of four and two teams of five for space reasons, much as I like smaller groups) with two desks left over. I will have to give up on my plan to have morning circle until I can get more rug pieces, because currently my rug is just too small. (What I will probably have to do is move the rug out from the wall a bit, and have them sitting on carpet squares all around its perimeter. They'll actually sit on the rug when they're in rows for lesson introduction or read aloud.)

We'll have to see how it goes... providing it ever actually fstarking happens. Bureaucracy can bite me.


*I never fully explained what this was, did I... It's got a couple of meanings. On the one hand, they're trying to keep the kids organized by reading level, so that no one has to cope with TOO much differentiation in the classroom. O will have the lowest kids (B-D, K-early 1 level), I'll have the mid-range kids (E-I/J, mid-to-late 1) and L will have the highs (J-P, 2nd-early 4th grade level). To answer Naomi, who asked me this a week ago by now, this differs from tracking in that the kids are re-evaluated and placed every year, so if they improve they'll be in a different class for third grade).

It also just means leveling the numbers. I have yet to have more than 20 kids in my classroom, despite the fact that my roll sheet says 25. L has had 28, with a roll sheet of 30, and O has actually had 30. So by the time we're done, L and I will have 26, and O will have 25. (some kids on the roll sheet don't actually go here anymore.)

So that's that.