Inch by inch

I had a melt down the other day after school - just sat at my desk and cried.  The pressure of How am I going to get all of these children reading by the end of the year? got to me and I cried.  There are still a significant number of my students who do not know all of their letters yet.  You're probably asking, "Isn't that what Kindergarten is for?  Learning letters?  It's only October!"

Over the years, expectations have changed.  By the end of Kindergarten, students are expected to be upper emergent readers - reading texts with sight words, sentence patterns, and picture support.  I'll address changing Kindergarten expectations in a future post.

The next day I did what I always do when I freak out about student progress - I assessed them!  Remember, I'm a math geek and so collecting data on my students is an obsession of mine.  After working with every student one-on-one I discovered that we are moving forward!! YEAH!  Progress is being made by every single student in my classroom!  Even my struggling student who I discussed in an earlier post learned the letters in his name!

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but a garden doesn't grow overnight.

Inch by inch

Row by row

I'm gonna make this garden grow!