Thursdays are usually days I dread. It’s the day I travel to my other school to teach two classes, both 4th/5th grade splits. The first class contains too many students who are disrespectful, rude, mean, careless, and unmotivated. I believe these students also negatively impact many of the other students in the class, who are probably pretty good kids. However, the group as a whole, is one of the worst classes I’ve had in my 15 years in education. The second class, isn’t bad. There are a lot more “normal” kids. Students who actually listen to me, want to find good books, and want to learn. However, because of the first class, I don’t really look forward to Thursdays.
I’ve been trying to rework the hour long class period to minimize unstructured time, which they can’t handle at all. I’ve tried to break up what we do, for how long, and with who to manage the group. I’ve split the class into two groups, one doing book checkout while the others are keyboarding and then switch after a short period of time. I’ve tried breaking the class period up into 15 minute periods to keep them moving from activity to activity a little more. Some of these changes have had a slight difference, but overall, there are just too many kids who do what they want and act inappropriately. I do get great support from the principal who is willing to pull kids from the class if I ask, but I sometimes feel as though I should be able to handle them for an hour. I’ve been trying to give the kids incentive for behaving – free time on the computer, but it doesn’t work much.
Today, the 4th graders were on a field trip so I only had the 5th graders. This was a nice change. The group was smaller but most of the “star students” were still there. We started off with keyboarding, which they have to do for a few minutes, moved into book checkout and then onto a Google Earth Scavenger Hunt. The kids really like Google Earth so I planned an activty that would take advantage of their interest. The kids like to play on Google Earth, which I think is valuable for them, but I can’t let them just play around every class period. Today, I created a Google Form with 7 questions on it. The students had to travel to three different locations (Lowe’s Motor Speedway, Gallaudet University, and Lackland Air Force Base), read through the Wikipedia entry, and answer a couple of basic questions. This really wasn’t a difficult activity, but it did require the kids to maneuver Google Earth, read nonfiction text, and do a litle research. Using a Google Form provided me with a quick assessment because their answers would show up in my spreadsheet. Prior to letting the kids loose, I demonstrated how to enter the locations into the search box, how to find the Wikipedia logo and then how to navigate back to the Google Form and enter the answers. Unfortunately, only some of the kids paid attention, resulting in a lot of “I don’t get this” and “How do you do this?” and “This is hard” comments from the peanut gallery. The students were able, for the most part, to get to the correct location, but the biggest challenge was actually reading the text and looking for answers. I was a little shocked. I wasn’t asking any deep questions, the questions were all right in the text and I don’t think the text was that difficult to read. In some cases, the question was a sentence from the article with a word or number removed. In the roughly 25 minutes the students had, only 10 or so finished.
The second class came in immediately after, consisting again of only the 5th graders. However, 5th graders from another class also showed up as well. The teacher told me about this in the morning, so I wasn’t shocked, but these were students I normally don’t teach. The teacher, who I’ve known for a long time, gave me quite the introduction to these students. After book checkout and keyboarding, it was time to introduce the lesson again. I quickly reworked the form to alter the order of the questions, moving easier questions first, but other than that, pretty much did the same thing as the previous group. This time, the results were much different. This group paid attention during the introduction, kept a positive attitude and put forth effort. What a difference! I was really pleased with the result of this lesson compared to the first group. The students picked up on what they were supposed to do and completed the assignment with minimal help.
The other part that was thrilling for me was the excitement the students from the other class showed. Most of them have never seen Google Earth and thought it was really cool. They had fun looking around and when they completed their assignment, explored their school and neighborhood for familiar places. I do believe these kids will want to explore Google Earth more, hopefully resulting a better understanding of geography.
On the way out the door, a couple students said to me, “I wish we had you as our librarian.” Awesome!