DISCLAIMER!!!! Todays post is a little shop talk so if you have no interest in the ins and outs of kindergarten teaching/class dividing, you will want to just skip todays blog and try again tomorrow.
In going over the calendar today I discovered that I don't have Kindergartners until September 4th- that is the Tuesday AFTER Labor Day!!! Wonderful News! Today we divided up all this years kiddos into 8 classes for the 1st grade team. We try to separate discipline problems and make sure each class has an equal number of highs, mediums, and lows. Of course we also want the boy/girl ratio to be good. This really seems like a great way to do it. We do the same thing with our Kindergarten kids before classes start in the fall...we get the kids in groups of 50 for our staggered days. Each student is assessed and also watched for behavior issues. Cards are written up on each student. After we have seen them all we take the cards and do the same type of piles that we did today for the 1st grade team. When we have made 7 classes that we are each happy with, we leave the room and our Principal assigns a teacher to the class. How acurate are our first day observations---VERY! I kept the cards and went back through at the end of the year to see who we had marked as high, med, low and who we starred for possible behavior issues. With the exception of 2 kids, we were RIGHT ON!
One last thing, keep all this info on the DL- these cards...they are top secret. If you ask me about them in public, I will probably deny their existance. ;)
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