Mr. Montgomery's Top 10 Things About Him: #9 Playing Games

Oh...Hi!

I was just checking out one of my game shelves.  You caught me on game night.  Every Tuesday, I host the teenagers from church for a board game night at my house.  My favorite hobby when I am not teaching is collecting and playing hobby board games.  I liked to play games when I was a kid, but I have discovered the most amazing games as an adult.  I like to read about games and try as many out as I can.  I also love teaching games and I will be showing you some of my favorites this year.  My favorite game in my collection is Flash Point: Fire Rescue.

Flash Point is a cooperative game where everyone works together to help put out a fire in a building.  We will meet some real firefighters this year and talk about fire safety.  They are truly heroes and role models. This isn't as serious as their job, but I enjoy playing this game because like real firefighters, you have to work together to be successful.  I think you can learn a lot about life through playing games.  Cooperation and teamwork are both very important for us to be the kind of team that I hope we will be.

There is another important lesson that you can learn when you play challenging board games.  You should always give your best in every challenge, but it is okay if you mess up sometimes.  Every time that I lose a game, I learn an important lesson and I will do a better job the next time.  I smile and say good job to whoever won the game.  I also make sure to remind myself that I had fun learning how to play better even if I am disappointed sometimes that I didn't win.

School is a lot like that.  We need to try our best everyday, but sometimes other people will do things better than us or we will not know the correct answers.  All I want you to do this year is try your best, learn from every mistake, and decide that you only need to make each mistake once.  Learning is fun!  We can congratulate our teammates on being successful and know that if we tried our best we are all winners.

I would talk more, but as you can see I have a lot of cleaning up to do tonight.  See you tomorrow when you will learn something new about me.

Top 10 Things about Mr. Montgomery:

10. My Family
9. Playing Games
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Mr. Montgomery's Top 10 Things About Him

Ladies and Gentleman, Boys and Girls, Children of All Ages!!  It is time to go back to school and for your expedition in Room 106 to begin.  I am so excited that we get to go on this journey together.  I was in the classroom today moving furniture and dreaming about the adventures in learning that we will be having this year.  I am VERY excited to get started, but first...I should introduce myself.

Hi!  I am Mr. Montgomery your new teacher.

I know many of you have seen me around the school, but do you really know me?  I am going to take you on a journey to discover the things that I love the most and hopefully this year I will quickly learn about the things that you love the most.  If you follow closely, you may see that we have something in common before the school year even begins.

Today, I want to tell you about my family. I love my family and I would love to tell you about all of them, but I will begin by introducing the people who live in my house.  This is my wife.  You know what her name is?  That's right...it is Mrs. Montgomery.

She is an amazing woman who helps make sure that I am at my best everyday.  I am excited because she just found an amazing new job where she won't be working on Fridays so we may actually get to see her at school. She is working at Natural Wellness and Pain Relief Center in Grand Blanc. She is also a LuLaRoe consultant and sells clothes from our home. She likes to read, shop, and travel to see her family.  Her family lives all over the country, so she has to travel around to see them all.  They live in New York, Illinois, Texas, and New Mexico. Her advice for having a great year is to "Have a positive attitude and smile everyday!"

MEOW!

Not yet Thomas...OK, I guess I can tell you more about Mrs. Montgomery another time.  Thomas has decided that it is his turn to be the center of attention.  Tom was here when we bought our house and moved from being an outside cat to quickly being the center of the family.  He works for the pest control company around our house catching mice and leaving them on the porch to surprise Mrs. Montgomery.  Thomas likes to sleep, hunt, eat, sleep, eat, and sleep.  He is kind of shy, but he sure likes to strut around the house when no one else is around.  His advice to have a great year is to "Meow meow meow meow purrrr meow meow meoooooooowwwww!"  I don't always understand everything he says, but I think he said, "Believe in yourself and you can do ANYTHING!"

You will find out more about me in the upcoming weeks, but I hope you enjoyed meeting two of the most important people in my life.  I will look forward to hearing about your families and how they help you be the best person you can be.  

I hope you are reading everyday and keeping your brain sharp.  We will have a lot of fun this year, but we will also be working hard.  With hard work, a good attitude, belief in yourself, and a smile we can do anything!

See you tomorrow!

Mr. Montgomery

Top 10 Things about Mr. Montgomery:

10. My Family
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State of the Team 2017: Reading

February 2017

March 2017

Prior to this year my reading instruction was focused on getting students to write good summaries and answer very basic questions about their reading.  This was something that created functional improvement as readers.  My students were growing in their ability to respond to their reading on the assessments we were giving them.  I was able to show my growth with their assessment data and was pleased with what I was doing.

One of the major changes this year is that we decreased emphasis on the prior assessments and began to focus on a new kind of test in the STAR reading assessment.  This assessment is not perfect, but it has shone a light on a weakness in my teaching and out current emphasis in reading.  In some ways our previous testing was restricting our understanding of where are kid's reading skills were due to writing skills being something that develop later and need to be taught more step by step.

In the two graphs above your will notice that every reader in our classroom is above the proficiency line for second graders at the end of the year.  I didn't post these graphs to show how some kids were higher in proficiency than others because each test up there is something to be proud about.

My battle this year has been how to help students who scored very high on the test, but they aren't moving their growth score numbers as much as I would expect from reading with them and talking to them.  After the test that led to the top graph in February, I changed some of my approaches because the class numbers had fallen below my expectations for myself as a teacher.

When we are looking at these graphs, I want you to focus on the number of dots in each section based on the horizontal scale of the graph.  The vertical scale changes between the graphs so it is hard to see the growth on that aspect, but the horizontal growth percentile scores have not changed.  These new approaches have led to more students above the 80th percentile and 90th percentile.  I am much happier with the bottom graph from March, but when you see our math data which I will post this week you will see that I aspire more.

I have taken a step back and really dug into teaching vocabulary and context skills.  I am finding that my students are exceptional at understanding grade level content.  They are struggling sometimes to evaluate new words and use skills to determine the meaning.  We have focused on making inferences of meaning from clues that we read and today even worked on making inferences with just pictures.  It is important to have new tools to help learn new words.

We have also spend some time each day writing two vocabulary words that challenge kids to think in new ways and while they know many of the words it helps them to write out the part of speech and look for ways to use it.  If you want to support this ask them about their word of the day and see if they can use it properly.  I have enjoyed these discussions.  We have also been focused on parts of speech and grammar as ways to break down sentences and look for word meaning.

Ultimately we have to make a transition from learning to read to helping our kids read to learn.  We need their brains to dig in deeper to what they read and be present in that moment making sure they are making meaning as they go.  It is tough because each of them reads wonderfully and they are good at answering the "school" questions that we have taught them to answer.  The next step will be challenging each other to think off the page and search for new meanings.

I shared this data as a "high five" to my team and as a way to show you the approaches that I am taking to addressing the need to challenge even the best readers to continue to improve each day.  Ultimately we want to develop children who make reading one of the most important investment times in their lives and not just something you do to log minutes.

I will have some more thoughts on reading following the rest of the State of the Class reports.  I look forward to sharing some more observations that I have been making about the students who are making the most growth on the STAR and not just the kids who have the "best" scores.

Pushing the Brain Forward

First marking period is over and our routines are established.  Many teachers would say that the next three months are the most important months of the year.  We have worked hard so that every minute is valuable this marking period.  I am very happy with where we are as a team.  I am happy with the positive attitudes about challenge and accepting mistakes.  I am excited to see where this takes us.

Wednesday we started talking about this picture of an orange that shows Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.  If we want to push the brain to continue to grow it is important for us to focus on the verbs that will let it grow.  I began meeting with reading groups and brainstorming with each group about the kinds of activities and questions we could ask that are further up the orange.  We have had class meetings to talk about the first two sections of this diagram which are remember and understand.  We will now take some more time to focus on the last four that really promote brain growth.

Teaching is a constant state of reflection about what we do well and what needs to improve and I am fired up and ready to continue to evolve and improve.  Some of our over-arching focuses for the marking period are going to be expanding our vocabulary, looking for relationships in math, supporting our writing with facts and evidence, and learning to take each thing that we do to a new level.

We had a fun experience in writing yesterday where the students wrote instructions for me to put on my jacket.  As I tried to follow their directions, I was silly and did things very literal.  We laughed and talked about the ways that directions can be more or less clear.  I want to push them to think about getting in touch with their audience as they write.  Out next two writing projects are going to be working on an opinion position and writing instructions to play a game.  Both of these pieces of writing will greatly benefit if students can visualize their audience as they write.

Two Words that Start with "D"

We wrapped up our STAR testing today and those reports will come home with their report cards when I am done with them next week.  Overall the numbers look very good and I am so impressed with the attitudes of the students.  On Monday we took the STAR reading and it was good, but not great.  This is the first year of the test and we are getting scattered data.  The kids all did excellent on their Dibels test that tests their fluency and retell abilities and so far DRA tests are showing improved written comprehension, but this STAR test is very inconsistent.

After the test we talked about what to do when you face a challenge.  You can let it defeat you OR you can become more determined.  This is something that I live by and it has kind of become a mantra of what we want to do.  We want to see these opportunities as places to make us stronger and not to run away from them.

Today after talking about this, we took our STAR math test and raised our class average from the 90th percentile at the beginning of the year to the 97th percentile today.  We have improved by over 100 points of scaled score growth on average.  17 students scored in the 99th percentile today and 21 students have reached that point at some point this year.  Last year at this point four of my students were in the 99th percentile.  I am super impressed with the quality of work and the determination to do our best.

A bunch of scores can never tell the whole story.  I will always value character growth above all other things.  The confidence I see growing in some students is heart warming.  I see a quiet determination and excitement to show what they can do on assessments.  This confidence is something that I long for every child to retain as they go forward in this culture that is built for them.  I want them to be able to go into a mode that gets them through their many assessments and gets them back out into excited to learn mode.  It is too easy to set kids up to get discouraged and defeated in today's high stakes environment.  I want my students to always go forward looking at assessments as challenge to overcome and as a place to excel.  I want to see them test with a smile and a cool confidence.  Then I want them back out in the world pushing the limits of learning.

Determination can always help conquer the feeling of Defeat.

Why Word Quest?

Who: Members of Team 106
What: Word Quest Vocabulary Builders
Where: Done at school and at home
When: Minimum of one word list a week
Why: Attempt to build vocabulary, knowledge of word patterns for spelling, and application into writing

I figured I would interview myself tonight.

Q: What do you hope to accomplish with Word Quest?
A: Ideally I would love for students to be motivated to dig deeper into their reading and writing to identify word patterns, learn new words, and become better spellers.  I would like this to be a way for students to have a meaningful conversation with their families and work together to think about how we spell words and use vowel patterns.

Q: What are you looking for in the sentence part of the quest?
A: I am looking for students to write a complete sentence with proper punctuation and capitalization.  I am looking for them to enjoy writing their sentences and creating them.  I would like to see them challenge themselves with difficult words and not fear getting some wrong.  I want to see a variety of sentences and see their writing voice come out.  I am looking for them to use their current skill correctly and especially hold onto past skills.  I am going to be more lenient when I see them choose the wrong pattern for long e by using "ee" instead of "ea" than I will if they don't identify that as a long e sound.  I am also looking for them to attempt to use their dragon words in their sentences.

Q: What are dragon words?
A: It is a fun way to motivate students to learn either words I think they should know how to spell or words or patterns that they have had trouble spelling.  For some it will be fixing common sight words that they can read, but they misspell in their writing.  For others it will be working on a commonly misspelled word list a couple at a time to make sure they are solid in those words.  This is designed to challenge students at all levels.  I would like students practicing their dragon words, writing them on the back page, and even using them in their other pages in their packet.  I then want them to correctly use them in two sentences either on one quest or two.

Q: What is the minimum participation?
A: I will be basing their work in word study on the successful completion of six quests by the end of the marking period.  I made that decision with six weeks to go in the marking period.  We have some students with one completed quest and we have a couple with seven or eight completed quests.  I need to set a minimum level of participation, but I want them to also be motivated to go beyond if they choose.  I will probably set a maximum output of three quests or I would be overwhelmed.

Q: What can parents do to help?
A: This isn't as much about skill and drill spelling as it is about absorbing word patterns.  There is value to old fashioned practice of some words, but their is just as much value as bringing home some words you found during the day and showing your student how they are used at work or the store.  There is value in reading together and finding words that fit patterns.  There is value in using authentic writing assessment to test the development of the skill like writing a letter, a story, a poem, or a comic strip.

Q: Where do we go from here?
A: I am hoping after working through some basic spelling patterns that at least some students will go into Greek and Latin root words as a way to pick up some new vocabulary and skills to decode larger words based on those clues found in root words.

If you have any further questions, please send them to me and I may do question and answer as one of my normal things.  Have a great night!

Learning in Action

Excuse the volume, but I wanted to try sharing video here to show you what we were doing in Science yesterday with the assistance of our watchdog.  We were reviewing how particles change states of matter based on their energy gained or lost.  I have no idea how much kids gained from this experience, but it is more memorable than a quiz on whether ice is a solid, liquid, or gas.  I am always looking for new ways to stretch their abilities to accept new ideas in their mind.

Language

I am on a huge push towards language acquisition.  Our growth numbers on the STAR reading assessment do not meet my normal standards and I am looking for new ways to push their ability to understand and comprehend.  I have a room full of wonderful readers who now need to transition from learners who are learning to read into learners that are reading to learn.  Word quest is going to be part of that push, but it is going to need to be a team wide effort to use strong vocabulary with kids, questions them about words, and show them how to use words in new ways.

Having a large vocabulary is a huge success factor in future endeavors.  It is not the only success factor, but it plays a huge role in the type of student they will become.  I am looking into other efforts and ways to spend my time that will yield the kinds of results we all want to see.  I am always looking for new ways to introduce great vocabulary if you run across resources that you find useful.