Small Group Struggles | Tuesday, August 31st 2021

[Music] so [Music] oh [Music] hi it's five o'clock i'm getting ready to go home um what did i do today i had to be here at 7 15 i had a meeting with a committee or a small group of people that are here with me to help support who's house which is the house system on campus just to kind of iron some things out to make life a little bit easier for everybody um so i had that meeting and then i taught in leadership the kids filmed some little video clips on their house uh because we have a little newscast that gets played every day and that newscast is put on by seventh grade leadership so they scripted out little um informational segments on each of the four houses and they filmed those today and i just finished sending those to the seventh grade teacher so that hopefully he can integrate it into the newscast and then in my main classes my homeroom class we talked about small groups ua universal access is what we call it here i will have them for an extra period on tuesdays and wednesdays and that extra period is meant for small group instruction normally in years past um this school has made it so that i think this is like a district thing third period for every class on campus was universal access and they would divvy up the entire grade level or level every student in the grade level based on ability which meant i would be teaching a class during third period that most of them weren't my students they were just other students from other eighth grade classes but they were all in the class together because their ability levels were the same i didn't love the idea um especially if you're teaching the group that has academic struggles because they literally have no one in class to really like model themselves after or to assist um and the classes could be quite large so it kind of just defeated the purpose and i had to teach language live my first year and that is some dry curriculum for eighth graders this year because of cobit we're not intermixing classes like that obviously so the nice thing about that is that we get to keep our own kids and run small groups in our class during that third period which is how we did it in elementary school which is what i think makes the most sense because you know your kids and you can kind of um integrate what they're already learning with the needs that they have so that started today and so i was just kind of explaining to them the plan on how it works now the only frustrating part is i do have students on ieps and um that gets special services and so i should have the support of an aide which i do um but that aid is theoretically supposed to be in like three places at once sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade because we are understaffed when it comes to aids so uh we're trying to figure out how she can be in three places at once um so that she can help with running small groups during that time and that's not her fault it's not the rsp teacher's fault the district is convinced that we have enough aids on campus to make this work but i know that they know that we don't and we say this every year and it doesn't get fixed [Music] and then we get frustrated and they wonder why it's hard to get teachers to teach rsp or why kids are not making the growth we want to see because there's only one teacher in the classroom and i can't do it all by myself and that poor lady can't be in three places at once so that's the frustrating part um is that i can't see as many kids or we can't see as many kids as we would like to because we're stretched then with staffing so i showed them this little chart that i made using canva last night let me see if i can make it bigger that just kind of shows them like how the day would go the rotations and so it's three blocks of 20. this is here twice because i should be meeting with one group and then the eight would be meeting with another these are just the names of the group they don't mean anything to the students but i know what they mean and then on thursdays and fridays it says miss lawrence because then my homeroom class is with her for that third period on thursday and fridays and then her homeroom class which is my switch classes with me on thursdays and fridays and so what i've decided to do in those 20 minutes 320 minute blocks is one block is them working on greek and latin roots because that's something that they all need another block is them working on their ixl lessons which are target lessons online based on their performance in language arts and then a 20-minute block is with me i won't see every group every day but when i am meeting with the group they're either going to be working on their extended writing project and i'm going to be instructing them based on where they are at in terms of their ability um or some other skill that i feel like they need to work on so we did that and then in my homeroom class we started getting into history that's why i wore this shirt today i teach history to save the future i showed you guys this over the summer it's from an etsy shop and we did a near pot lesson on colonial america and um we talked about the atlantic slave trade so i used this video that i found last year from ted ed that's really good about talking about the atlantic slave trade and explaining how it originated and touching on how you know there were different types of slavery and slaves were coming from different places for a period of time they were indentured servants and um there were african tribes trading slaves because it was like a casualty of warfare and then how it transitioned to like the united states relying heavily and why the united states was relying heavily on slave labor after learning about the three uh colonial areas new england middle colonies and southern colonies so we talked about the geographical differences of all of those places and then when we got to the southern colonies just making sure they understood in that area like that colony was surviving and thriving off of cash crops and they needed a lot of human labor to make money off those crops which then leads them to start relying heavily solely almost on slavery so we talked about that and um in language arts we talked we did a little vocabulary video and read and respond activity on theme because tomorrow we're gonna do a study sync lesson using the monkey's paw on theme my switch class is about a day behind so they had to finish the monkey's paw which we did talked about it um they still have a skill lesson no no they don't they didn't get to the read and respond activity that i did with my homeroom class and we didn't even get to the history lesson at all um because we also in social studies i forgot to mention did article of the week so we did the plus one routine which is what we did last week where i read the article with them they try and jot down as many key details and facts as they can remember just from memory and then they rotate their paper around and their table mates do the same so time was short they were both disappointed because we did not get to all your twisted secrets today and i'm just as disappointed as they are but i have to like study sync is the priority so i always have to make sure i get that done first and then fit in the book later which i will so that is really it um yeah i don't really have anything else to show um there was nothing i didn't feel like i was doing anything dynamic in my teaching or worth vlogging today so i didn't do anything like that but um i think i'm just gonna oh no i said that already i think i'm gonna just cut this one short today if you guys don't mind um i just i do feel like i'm forgetting something but i'm probably not i'm just gonna cut this one short give myself a break uh but today all in all it was a good day i'm just i don't i hate when my two classes are that far apart from each other so now this dress is like closing the gap but it is what it is but if you enjoy today's quick glimpse in my day give this video a thumbs up if you're not subscribed make sure you subscribe if you're not following me on instagram head over there and follow me at smartystyle and as always i hope that you guys are well and if you're not well please be well and i will see you guys tomorrow goodbye [Music]

Channel: SmartieStyle

Views: 2,194

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Id: eAzGp-nj4rU

Length: 9min 21sec (561 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021