January 28th, 2013

Meeting with Kathy Graupman re:Common Core Learning Standards
*present-Theresa, Lorie D., Casey, Joe, Katie, Kelly, Amy, Amy B., Kim H., Tracie (& 3 participation students)

Lorie D.-With the higher level vocabulary that is part of the test, can we support the kids with the higher level vocabulary. There was something stated in the sample ELA test about treating some of the vocabulary as "directions."

Kathy-Make sure you hit the genre that was shared with us before the test; folktales, myths, fables. We have many resources on folktales and fables, but very little resources on myths. Any genre from previous years of focus will likely be part of the test. Check the link from Kathy from Jim (Blair?), the Rochester area's library media person, that she sent last week. It includes links to resources.

Tracie-SIT provided an appendix with resources and an activity to work through. Kim passed this out to everyone. We are to choose a passage from the list of grade 2-3 passages samples and develop scaffolding experiences to help the students prepare for the task. As a grade level, commit to a passage & performance task. 
*Poem by Joyce Milton Bats:Creatures of the Night and the performance task listed in the sample assessments.
**All of us find a poem and determine a practice performance assessment and an outline of how to scaffold 
i.e. What does the author mean by...? What do you need to know...? What clues are there to help you know...?

www.lexile.com will help with determining the complexity (one part of it). Christy will provide copies of the resources from the workshop that Kathy provided us.

Kathy-She is going to be working with BOCES tomorrow on creating a SD opportunity how to write lessons and units that will support the different modules. This will take place 3-4 days after school this spring. It would be helpful to do it with someone else to be able to work together. 

Casey- now looking at the sample ELA test and how it is going to be much more challenging compared to their pre-assessment. What happens if my kids who earned more than a 50% on pre-assessment, are not able to reach 85% to show "growth?" Kathy said that this happen in FACS in HS. Once we see what the state gives as a test, we will compare the types of questions to the pre-assessment and go from there. 

Kathy would like to see what our team develops for SIT once we are done with it. 

January 14th, 2013

Meeting in Theresa's Room (Kim, Joe, Amy, Theresa, Christy & Katie)-shared resources for context clues by using non-sense words (resource from Katie's book group; Catching Readers Before They Fall). We decided that our kids are still struggling with context clues, so we will extend through another week. The week of January 28th, we will focus on prefixes (dis, ir, re, & un) & suffixes (s, es, ly, ed, ing are the most used suffixes) so we will need a pre-test to have for the next meeting.  This meeting will be in Joe's room.  

Monday, January 7th

Meeting in Kim's Room (Theresa, Kelly, Joe, Amy, Casey, Katie & Christy)
*We discussed our next Progress Monitoring-Context Clues. We are starting this week and will continue through until January 18th. We pulled resources from last year, as well as quick cards to use. Amy is sending out the pre-test. Muffaro's Beautiful Daughters is a great read aloud to introduce context clues.
*We discussed the challenges with vocabulary-even just giving directions to the kids like "read this passage." We shared out different tools that we are using to work on vocabulary (i.e. Word Wizards, Word Study combined with Vocabulary for kids exceeding Spelling Inventory benchmark). 
*Next meeting is is Theresa's Room on January 14th.