conuly

I was the only one who made it - the other grown-ups I saw were taking their kids out of school because of the snow. When Ana gets home, I'll have her change fast and send her out to play, or maybe we'll even go to Silver Lake. It's great packing snow.

They're going over in Ana's class "fact families", which is basically a run-down of the commutative property of addition plus the related subtraction equations. (So if they get the problem 3 + 8 = ? they're supposed to work out 3 + 8 = 11, and then write down three more problems: 8 + 3 = 11, 11 - 8 = 3, 11 - 3 = 8. Easy peasy for some of them.)

So they do group work together, and then they go into their separate leveled groups to do practice work on their own. (Ana is in the "Red" group, but I don't know what group that is. I can guess based upon the fact that these were the kids saying that their work was "easy". I have to talk to Ana about that, and maybe the teacher as well. If they're saying the work is easy, what is the effect on the kids for whom it's not easy? It's not much better than saying, if somebody gets it wrong, "Oh, that's so stupid". Ana wasn't one of the ones commenting on how easy it all was (she was the one saying you're not supposed to talk while working...), but just in case I want to make sure she knows that's Not Acceptable.)

I was also a little concerned, the kids were fidgeting a bit. That's normal - they're six and seven, after all! - but the teacher didn't seem to have much of a way to deal with it other than to tell them to stop and to make threats she obviously didn't want to carry out (you never want to have to carry out a threat, really, because once you do, what do you do NEXT?) about taking away a gumball from the chart that, when it's full of gumballs, will get the class a small treat. At the end of the group work a lot of kids were suddenly getting up with an urgent need for the bathroom (in the classroom) or a tissue, presumably because that doesn't constitute fidgeting. But if they're moving in their seats, it's not because they want to annoy the teacher or disrupt the class, it's because they need to move, right? If you don't want them to fidget, surely it's better to deal with the problem at the source (whatever it is that's making them move around, probably just the effect of sitting still too long) than to try to fix it at the end? Heck, there's probably a way to do that without even pausing the math lesson. But I didn't think that this was the right time or place to bring this up, honestly. There might not be a right time or place for this one.