Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Second Day Down

Whew!

The l!stening s3lection went fine this morning. The students all wrote busily for a good amount of time. I looked over a few shoulders; one girl, fairly mid-to-low before, totally bombed it. I was very disappointed. I hope all the other writing was a little more on target. But at least we've gotten through this much.

As for the comment/questions from yesterday's s3lection, check the comments on that post.

I talked to Mr Principal about the parent. She'd already contacted him. I briefly explained the situation. He understands and we'll have a meeting, but he's got my back. Which is a huge, huge relief; when dealing with last year's pain-in-the-ass-parent, Mr AP totally did not have my back. So it's good to know that I have support this year. Really, really good.

I had a good conversation last night with my friend N. We exchanged anecdotes about our shitty days, and we laughed and vented and commiserated. It made me feel a lot better. Hurrah for friends!!

Today was a fine day.

I gave the students the extra credit options, they did some reading, and we reviewed the different sentence functions. I found a handout in a lesson book on grammar and quickly adapted it. I gave them definitions for declarative, interrogative, exclamatory and imperative sentences, they made their own examples, and then they drew a creature and wrote a paragraph about it, using each of the sentences types. Fun and efficient and I hope effective.

Oh, and we played Boggle yesterday and today. They love it. I'm cultivating the future generation of word-game geeks! Watch out, they're gonna beat you!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Jules -

Some parents can be incredibly difficult. Sometimes it helps to start the conversations with them by describing the positive aspects of the student. For example, if the child is encouraging other students to misbehave and disrupt your class, you could begin your conversation with his parents by telling them that their child has very strong leadership skills. If you haven't seen any positive qualities in a student, you should tell the parents that their child has a great deal of potential and that you are very sad to see him misbehave since he really has the potential to be a very successful student. The key to handling difficult parents is usually to convince them that you like their child (no matter how many times he may have set your classroom on fire) and that you are trying to help him.

Best of luck,

Jaclyn