Spelling

When I was in elementary school I remember all of my learning of spelling to be based on spelling tests. I am horrible at memorizing lists and thus never did very well with spelling tests. I am still to this day a bad speller. Thank goodness for spell check. Although I know spelling tests should not be the bulk of my teaching of spelling I am unsure what other methods are out there. I know students learn to spell through reading constantly and through writing but once you get past a certain point how do you continue to add words to a students memory that they can spell correctly.  I hope through my courses to learn some better techniques to teaching spelling than spelling tests!!

Exchanging instead of borrowing

I had a parent ask me yesterday what the heck exchanging was. She had never heard of it and her son had no idea what he was supposed to be doing. So far in his schooling he had learning about borrowing and was not making the connection that these two words meant the same thing.

In my class now we are learning to move away from borrowing and move towards the use of the term exchanging in math. It is the same thing only you are emphasizing that the student isn't just borrowing one and moving it down a space but that they are exchanging one group of ten for ten ones. This is supposed to help with students are are borrowing but have no idea why or how they are supposed to be doing this.

I am disappointed in the teacher for not sending a letter home explaining what this new concept was because it is not a familiar concept but I really hope the parent sits down with the teacher and talks about it.

Dough

When subbing in a fourth grade classroom I got to experience their reward system called dough. The students earn dough for doing good things such as being on task with out the teacher asking but they also can lose dough for bad behavior. Then When they have earned enough dough they can purchase a license to sell. Then on a few Fridays the students set up shop in the classroom and sell the items they have brought to sell. What I saw was cookies, bracelets, headbands, pickles, toys, candy and soda. The stores were in 4 of the fourth grade classrooms and they all participated walking from room to room. They had so much fun and little did they know they were learning valuable skills. They were practicing their math when giving change and they were learning about running a store. One of the teachers was charging the students for rent, water, electricity and some of the other basic needs to run a store. I loved that idea!If I am in a high enough grade when I get my own class I will definitely be stealing this idea.