I taught what our district calls "Acceleration" this year, it's a TAKS (state standardized test) tutorial class for kids that didn't pass last year. I actually really enjoy teaching this class. My largest class was 7 students. I got to know most of them very well, and will also actually miss most of them. There is a certain freedom teaching this course, as there is no curriculum provided, though I was given resources to use. I took the approach this year, as I had learned from teaching it last year, that most of the students to not lack the thinking skills needed to do well on the test. They lack the desire to use higher level thinking skills for the purposes adults wish them to be put to and often they lack the background knowledge needed to make the connections in a test designed my upper-middle class and rich people. How often have you assumed that someone else has read a book as a child simply because you have fond memories of it, or it's a classic? The test makers do the same thing. We did a lot of worksheets, Mad Libs, picture puzzles, and read some classic fairy tales.
Since I had such a small set of students this year, I made them their own personalized bookmarks. Many of these kids aren't much into reading, but that's ok. Here are most of them, I passed out a few today. I tried to make them unique by doing a different font for each student and a picture of something they like.
No comments:
Post a Comment