Friday, May 13, 2011

MAP

I just had some kids work their butts off for me this morning!

The building I work in has been MAP testing their third graders all week, so they have put the paras to work making sure that the kids go slowly enough to actually understand the questions before they answer them. They're third graders. This is boring. They just want to be done with it. We bribe them with fruit snacks.

Jessica is less than a fan of the entire situation.

But...all week, they've worked hard and carefully and gotten the scores to prove it. Today was above an beyond even that.

A) I had a boy who was doing well enough on the math that he was finding himself staring at computer screen after computer screen of problems that were more letter than number. This is a third grader. He has never seen a radical in his life, much less a function table. This is a kid who freaks out when he doesn't know if he is doing what is expected of him or doesn't know what is going on.

He buckled down, and experimented a little, and legitly got to the right answers on several of them.

Impressed.

B) I had another boy who was working on his reading test. There is nothing to say about that one except that the kid WORKED HIS BUTT OFF. If you could do battle with a test, he did battle with this one.

He decoded (and remembered!) dozens of words that were HARD for him, even though there were times that you could tell he just wanted to get up and walk away.

He read, and re-read, and re-read again for me for two straight hours. We ran out of fruit snacks in his baggie there were so many questions. We kept a running count of how many questions left. We read every single word that it was possible to sound out. We went s. l. o. w. l. y.

And then, we both rejoiced a little bit when he got an awesome score.

I'm pretty sure that kid had wings on his feet when he went back upstairs to tell his teacher that he had finally finished.

And, just to make the day that much better, God decided to send the sunshine and warm weather back to visit again. Definitely a fan of that one.

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