Did you hear about the guy who got hit in the head with a can of soda? He was lucky it was a soft drink.

We had a very interesting week this week. I went to my school twice this week, and for a half day on Monday and full day on Friday. I learned how to laminate today, and that as fun! We got a new student randomly today, and my CE met the grandmother of the little girl at the parent teacher conference the night before. So we got the new girl all settled in to them class and got her a name tag and everything, then our students went to specials. When the students came back to the classroom, we had a new little boy in our class...apparently the new girl and boy were brother and sisters, and the boy was more to handle so they stuck him in my CE’s classroom. The little girl got switched to another 2nd grade classroom. We had to the get the little boy settled into the classroom. I assessed level one sight words with the new boy in our class while the rest of the class took a spelling test. The new boy, only knew two sight words out of a stack of fifty. I asked my CE why the brother and sister had moved to Bethware in the middle of this semester, and apparently the grandma took the kids out of a homeless shelter because the mom could not support them anymore. So the children have had a very hard home life. During my guided reading group today, my case study kid had a breakdown, and refused to pay attention to me and do his work in my lesson. If you call this kid down too much, he takes it very personally and just shuts down. So the little boy was mad at me for getting on him to pay attention throughout my whole lesson. After my group time, he left the classroom and would not do anything for my CE for about thirty minutes, and then he randomly started being a good student again. I was working with an EC and speech impaired student on fluency, and she actually read through her entire passage twice in one minute! I was so proud of her, and she was so proud of herself! I love seeing those moments. Lastly, a student told me that he was being checked out today to see his therapist about anger management. I would have never guessed that he had anger problems, because he is always an angel on our classroom.

In the second grade, students are learning about the different kinds of graphic organizers. In my small group, I like to us them to organize the students thoughts about what we have read, and to help them better understand the book. Instead of printing out copies online, I like to have my students make their own, that way, when they have to write on their own, they can organize their thoughts in different ways without having a worksheet. I found an article on Edutopia, talking about the correct way to use graphic organizers in the classroom, and I found it very interesting. I did not know that there was a right or wrong way of using the graphic organizers, I just thought whatever works, works. First of all, what is a graphic organizer? A graphic organizer is a visual display or chart that shows the relationship between ideas, facts, and information.  The ultimate purpose of utilizing a graphic organizer as a tool is to prepare students for writing. Simply put, a graphic organizer assists a student with thinking and is a pre-writing tool -- not the end product. Some young writers may need this thinking tool more than others. As I’ve seen in my many classroom observations, we teachers can get caught up with treating the graphic organizer as The Assignment, especially with struggling students. At some point, with learners who are struggling, we need to stop encouraging them to finish filling in those boxes or columns on the graphic organizer and move into what matters: the writing. It’s much more important for a student to practice writing -- the only way to build writing fluency -- and stumble through stringing thoughts together this way than to fill in a graphic organizer completely or perfectly. I am very guilty of just using a graphic organizer as the assessment piece of writing comprehension, but from researching this topic, I see now that graphic organizers should be used as a tool to guide writing, instead of the assessment piece all together. 

The research on graphic organizers is aligned with the NCPTS number four, because this shows how a teacher can facilitate graphic organizers in their classroom to enhance the writing progression in the classroom. Also, it explains how as teachers we could not be using them to their fullest ability.  

http://www.edutopia.org/blog/using-graphic-organizers-correctly-rebecca-alber