Day 27: Daily Edits and Other Work

I know I've said I would share the topic of Daily Edit with you.  I figured now is as good a time as ever to explain what they are since I just gave a stack to my new student to work through at home.

Our daily edit is actually a group of four pages that the students complete as the first part of their morning work each day.  The first two cover proofreading, sentences, parts of speech, analogies, and vocabulary.  There is always a short passage the students are required to read through and correct for errors.  (This passage we do together until the students are able to do it on their own.) The last two cover basic math skills, and logic/problem solving problems where the students are required to draw a diagram or model of some sort in order to figure out the answers to the math problems below.  A former teacher used materials from several different books to create a daily edit that supplemented the regular curriculum.
  
With our reading program, Houghton Mifflin 'Reading,' we come back and visit topics again.  The nice thing about our daily edits is that they cover a lot of the skills we are doing in our reading series.  When the binder work was put together, the teacher who created them put the skills in the order we would come across them in the curriculum.  She even laid it out so that there was some preview of work to come and review of work we did.  So already my second graders have been exposed to and reviewed homophones, homonyms (multiple-meaning words), synonyms, antonyms, compound words, punctuation, capitalization, word families, sentence structure, analogies, nouns, verbs, adjectives, genre, proofreading, and singular and plural nouns.  

I have chosen to give my new student the daily edits she has missed as sort of a foundation for the writing, grammar, and math skills she has missed.  We are beginning a new unit in Language Arts on Tuesday.  During this unit, there will be several writing projects, a revisiting of comprehension skills that were learned in first grade as well as some new skills for this year, and vocabulary exercises. 

In math, we are still working through different strategies to add (13 in all according to our Everyday Math curriculum), and strategies for subtraction in order to help the children recognize and retain their basic facts.  Math is a universal language, and she has been doing well so far.  I have decided to pick out the pages in her math book that are related to the skills we are working on now.  Since Everyday Math is a spiraling curriculum, she will be exposed to those skills over and over throughout the quarter.

In social studies we finished our first unit, which was on communities, and the second unit is more of a continuation of that idea.  I have decided that I am going to take a break from social studies and teach science in its place since, a) our daily schedule does not permit both being taught at the same time (We have one block of time during the day to teach either science or social studies.), and, b) I already did a unit in social studies.  So this week we are going to start our Foss science curriculum. That way, when we go back to social studies, the review of communities will be a review for everyone and my new student will benefit from that review.  (Besides, trying to teach science one day or week at a time and then social studies the alternating week or day has shown to be too confusing for the students.  So now I alternate by unit.)

It's a fine balancing act, trying to get her caught up without overwhelming her and her parents.  On one hand, she needs those most vital skills for her foundation.  On the other hand, she would be buried under work if I gave her every single assignment she missed for those 25 days. 

Bit by bit, I'll get her there. 

Day 26: "New" Student

Today I welcomed a "new" student to my class.  I say "new" because she is not new to the school, just to my class.  Let me explain.

My school has a group of students who travel to their countries of origin over the summer.  Sometimes they do not return until after the school year begins.  This particular student was on my roster for the beginning of the year, but she could not be dropped from my class roll until she missed so many days.  At that point, she was withdrawn with the understanding that when she returned she would be registered as a re-entry and added back to my roll.  She was added yesterday and joined my class today.

So where to begin?  The parents would like me to send home all of the missed work (for a month's time).  A family friend was supposed to pick up the work on a weekly basis to send, but never came.  This child has missed 25 days of school work.  In those 25 days, she has missed 25 daily edits, 40-plus pages of the math workbook, 30-plus pages of the reading workbook, six weeks of spelling activities and tests, four comprehension quizzes, one reading unit test, four writing projects, one math unit test, half of unit two in math, one unit of social studies, 10-plus writing journals, and numerous hands-on activities.  Now I need to figure out what the most vital pieces of information are so she can be somewhat caught up with the rest of the class.  I started with the daily edits today.  The rest will just have to trickle through in the next few weeks.

Even though she is not new to the school, she is new to my class, which means the routines have to start all over again.  My class was really helpful today in trying to get her acclimated to everything, but you know how little kids are.  They don't quite understand the term "overkill."  I tried to warn them yesterday before dismissal by telling them to remember that today was her first day and she will already be overwhelmed with all of the things that come with a typical first day of school.  Some of them got it.  Some of them didn't in their eagerness to help.

Tomorrow's another day.  Hopefully we didn't scare her off!