So sorry to have neglected this blog! It certainly doesn't mean that I haven't been writing about my team teaching experience! The writing just hasn't manifested itself onto the blog: notebooks, scribblings in my plan book, discussions over lunch, on the phone, even on my other blog.

Wednesday night, I sat down to grade vocabulary and the first quiz over The House on Mango Street. I knew the quiz was challenging, and I was curious to see what the students in my team taught class would do. Unfortunately, I wasn't impressed. The highest grade was 15 out of 20. Most were 50% and below.

I called Amy to see what she thought we should do. We agreed that students should be provided an opportunity to fix their errors. That will happen next week during tutorial.

Based on our conversation, we re-planned the next day. We decided we would go over figuartive language, again. Students would take notes as well as find examples in the book, again. We also are requiring students to create their own word banks -- in a section of their notebooks, students write the misspelled word in one column, and the correct spelling in the next column. We focused on where to find correct spellings -- teachers, peers, and the dictionary. The hope is we'll help students create a community of learners as well as students who can advocate for themselves.

With the vocabulary assignment, it proved helpful to go over the instructions, again, and give students the opportunity to correct their errors. The second set was much better. Amy is grading the set we just collected.