Are you settling into Common Core with style?

Wow, September was hectic!!!! My district barely had any of the materials ready that were needed to teach these modules! So frustrating!  It it weren't for the teachers pulling together I honestly don't know how we would have made it through September!  

How are your students liking the lessons?

ELA - So far so good!  I am really impressed with how my students are rising to the occasion with these lessons.  I am using Lesson 8 in Unit 1 as a mid-unit assessment.  This is the writing piece about Nasreen's Secret School.  Instead of using the graphic organizer we used index cards to organize the writing.  Then they put the index cards in order to create paragraphs.  I was pleasantly surprised by how wonderful these paragraphs came out!  It's also been heartwarming to see how the students showed so much empathy for Nasreen and her life.  This was a very emotional story for some students in my class - especially when we saw the picture at the end of her parents in the clouds (heaven) looking down on Nasreen.  Another adaptation that I made  in my class was with Lesson 9 for That Book Woman.  The lesson calls for you to give students excerpts from the story and then they write down the gist of each excerpt.  The language was EXTREMELY DIFFICULT for my students.  I have several students where english is their second language, so it took some real endurance and stamina to get through this story on both of our parts!  Instead of giving the students the excerpts, I read each excerpt with my class and we wrote down the gist of each excerpt together in notebooks.  I will post a picture tomorrow of what this looked like!  The kids really enjoyed this interactive notebook activity.

MATH - Well the math is tough! Right? OMG!  The kids are having the toughest time just following directions and figuring out what the question is asking them to do.  I'm up to lesson 11 right now in class.  My students did the Mid - Unit Assessment and though it wasn't a class of 24 - 100's, I still was happy with the progress they made.

I have to keep reminding myself... common core is mainly about teaching the students how to learn, and less about what to learn.  Its frustrating and difficult but if we keep trucking along with the program, I think we will be surprised by what they are capable of.

Store Updates!  I am running another sale on Columbus Day Weekend!  Module 2A Unit 1 will be released very soon!