Clicks and Clunks

This week, our school's power (vocabulary) word is strategy.

In honor of this, I'll share about one of my new favorite strategies: "clicks and clunks".

I'm aware this is in no way a new strategy and is taught in numerous teacher prep courses.  However, it's new to me :)

I read about it in my beloved CORE source book:

And it's really "clicking" with my students.

(By the way, I googled for an image of the CORE book and my own image from a prior blog post came up...weird moment.)

Basically, it's a formative assessment where students analyze thier own learning.  They share what's "clicking" in their heads and what is "clunking" (not making total sense).

We talk about the importance of being honest and talk about why things are clunking.

I have my students give me fist bumps on their way out the door and share their clicks/clunks with me.

Yesterday, one student told me that our weekly phonics skill (/s/, /sh/, /z/) was clunking with her because she was confused about the letters.  Using this clunk, I explained in a different way during our word study this morning and she got it :) 

 (Hopefully others did too but since she specifically told me that was a clunk, I wanted to help her with it)

Speaking of clicking and clunking, here are mine for the day:

Clicks:

Almost all of my students are making growth on RCBM for Aimsweb for their oral reading fluency and words per minute.  One that went down had a very honest conversation that he wanted to try reading without using his finger as a place holder to see if he really needed it.  Turns out, he does need to keep track of his place with his finger but more importantly, he realizes that it's a strategy he needs to use because it helps him. 

Some of my students have grown over forty words since their beginning of the year benchmark.  Yes, you read that correctly. 40 words. In a minute.  They're almost at their end of year ambitious goals.

Clearly our daily repeated reading, buddy coaching and fluency stations are working!

Clunks:

Voice levels still aren't where they need to be.

Our server was down today: no access to my documents, my premade lessons, my email or the internet.  We made the best of it but it was frustrating being without technology.

Happy Friday! (almost...)