September has lasted FOREVER

My mini goal for the month was to plan a schedule for the year to determine how many days each of my lessons should take in order to fit everything in, and to give me a quick idea of what each day will consist of. I accomplished my goal! I have a schedule for all 5 grades now. The tricky part is knowing when to adjust the schedule. As Tiffany said in a comment on another post, sometimes you have to go slower to make sure they learn it, and then adjust the next project accordingly. Because I do want to stay somewhat on schedule I think what I will adjust most is the type of artwork students do to learn a concept. I think for 4th and 5th I will be doing fewer large drawings/paintings and more smaller ones that won't take as many days to finish. This way I can spend time helping them learn and also encourage good craftsmanship, knowing that it is a small enough artwork that they will hopefully finish in a reasonable amount of time. In the past they have done some large artworks that take so long that instead of taking time to make sure they are learning the concept I just have them work on the art to get it finished. I struggle with finding a balance between work time and discussion/teaching time. I know it is important to learn vocabulary, think about essential questions, look at art and talk about it. But making art is important to.

How do you balance teaching or "learning" time with time to work on assignments? (Knowing of course that sometimes these things overlap.)

Grading Rubrics Posted!

One of my goals this year is to have the grading rubric for each project posted so that students can see how they will be graded ahead of time. Last year I just discussed how they would be graded with them the problem is not all kids listen and I also felt that a visual would help. So far it has!

My plan is to discuss the grading rubric with them on the day we start the project and show them where it is posted for them to look. It is nice to also be able to point and refer to it while students are off task and remind them of how they will be graded.

I also plan to attach grading rubrics to EACH project this year for 2nd- 5th grade. :) I tried to last year- but I didn't always do it...... it is so much easier not to.

For 4th and 5th grade they will be grading themselves and then I will grade them. I am just not sure how to explain this becuase some kids were very confused last year. Any suggestions???? My thought is to walk them through it the 1st few projects and take it from there.

Emily do you give rubrics to 1st grade too? I just found last year that they didn't even care what their grade was they just wanted their artwork back.

Goal

My goal this year has been to start implementing various aspects of the SIOP model. Specifically I am working on adding language and content objectives to each of my classes. While this has been difficult and time consuming, I hopefully will be able to save myself a lot of time by saving the objectives for the next few years. I have been especially thorough in implementing my objectives (both content and language) in my English Learners class. The students have benefited greatly from the extra focus it provides on my lessons. Even mainstream students have benefited from the organization. This in turn has minimized questions from students who either arrive late for class or miss a class. In addition to the implementation of objectives, I have also reorganized my room so that missing work and late work is easy to find and to turn in. I continue to update my website for students and parents and use the template as a reference for myself when teaching specific units.

Emily poses an interesting question, because it is something I am also working on. As the only art teacher teaching three different courses, it is up to me to come up with my own unit pacing guides. It is a lot of work, but important work. It is my third year teaching here in Shakopee, and each year poses a different obstacle. The first year felt like chaos - learning the rules, procedures, ordering, teaching, curriculum, teaching!. The second year I felt more comforable with everything, and the third year (this year) is more about improving the curriculum for student learning. In some ways I feel like it is my first year again, because I am so busy improving curriculum, re-arranging units/projects, timing, etc. I really wish I had the unit pacing guide done before working on the curriculum, but it just doesn't work that way. I think we need to be comfortable teaching the content and understanding how long it takes for students to complete and understand a unit before moving on. Creating unit pacing guides is one of our vertical team goals for this year (as secondary art teachers).

Hey

Just re-figured out how to log back into my gmail account. Hopefully will be able to start blogging again here soon!