Report Cards

I'm preparing report cards. The news overall is not good. These children on average don't know what a letter or number is, let alone which ones you're pointing to or what sounds they make, etc. I had little ones saying everything but a number when identifying numerals 1-15. I have some kids who recognize not a single letter or its sound. This is after ten weeks of daily, and often twice daily or more, drilling. We chant the ABC song. We recite it again with phonics added and an "alphafriend" to help remember. We practice phoneme segmentation with picture cards. We make silly sounding "starts with" noises all day long. I am seeing growth, but a lot of kids are still getting a "needs improvement" on their first report cards. And I mean everything pretty much needs improvement. We've got our work cut out for us. And speaking of "cut out", right when these kids need it the most, a quarter of our sparse paraprofessional hour is cut in favor of the special ed room. I said I was fine with that, since the school is under some AYP scrutiny and SPED is especially hurting. It's in the school's best interest for those kids to get that support. But it's certainly not in my students' best interest! I have no idea how to proceed with one of our four reading rotations sans adult. The kids can't do it independently! I don't want to raise a stink, but I'm going to have to ask the administration for help.

On the other hand, my kindergarteners rocked starfall.com yesterday! I spent their entire morning recess booting up and logging on to all the machines in the computer lab. They were all over it, finding apps I hadn't ever noticed, helping each other, totally loving it! We have an open sign-up policy for the computer lab, and I noticed that the whole month is me and the 5th and 6th grade teachers. My little buggers are going to be rocking it by June.

Which is looking more and more will be my class in June. After all, I am a substitute teacher who's preparing report cards. Next week is parent-teacher conferences. I really want to stay put here. Beside the fact that I need the work, it would be awfully hard on the kids to suddenly have a new teacher. Especially the ones with abandonment, attachment, or change issues. Which is a lot of them. Foster care is rampant in my class, and a consistent adult at school shouldn't be too much to ask. Out of my hands though.