Catching Up

I can't believe it's been a month since I've written last! There has been a lot going on in my classroom and I guess things have just been a touch hectic. Because I'm a fan of bullet point lists, here's what's been going on in Milan.

• My cheerleaders have cheered at a total of one game. The last two have been cancelled due to the other teams not having enough players to put on the field. I guess this happens when you play class 1A football. We've got a game Monday that's about 90 minutes away, and then a game October 15th at home.
• In class, we've worked our way through two workshop topics: place value and multiplication/division. I tell you, it's slowly showing results. I'm still helping a few to really grasp the process of long division, and there are a few kids who mix up multiples and factors, but overall I feel like this is going well. I have yet to grade their post-tests for multiplication/division, but I'm hoping the results are there. I still have their pre-tests to compare them with, so we'll see how they're doing. Monday marks the start of decimals. I'm just lucky that the calendar and other assignments worked out to give me until Thursday to get all those pre-tests graded!
• We've had two PD days so far, and I'm hoping that they all go as smoothly as this has. 
• They gave us MAP data, which is our standardized test in Missouri. I've been looking at the scores that my 5th graders made last year. They also gave me the current 6th graders information, but because that wasn't my teaching's results, I'm not quite sure what to do with it. I offered it to the 6th grade teacher, though, so he could look at it. 
• Our other PD day dealt with differentiated instruction. I've been doing well with this, I think, but it makes me nervous to have others look at my work and decide if what I'm doing is actually differentiation. There's a lot of tension from other teachers during these meetings, though. Most of it stems from the district not wanting to group students from classroom to classroom, but wanting us to group them within the one class. Personally, I know that having my lower students all together at once would help me a lot because I could cater more to them as a class, and the same goes for my high learners. And it'd be a lot easier to do that than rotated workshops. But you work with what you've got, I suppose.
• Homecoming in a small district means EVERYONE gets way too excited about the occasion. I had 5th graders bouncing off the wall because it was homecoming week. This never happened during my student teaching, and it never happened when I was growing up, either. I don't think we even knew what and when homecoming was when I was in elementary school. And being in charge of cheerleaders means having to participate. And having way too much going on. Which leads to getting behind in grading the week before a 6 week grade check goes home.

Can we discuss how we've already made it through 6 weeks of school?! Only 30 to go. Which doesn't sound like a lot when I really stop and think about it. How am I going to cram everything else into 30 weeks?!