Jess rhymes with....

so i found out today that Norbit does not know my name... he has always just referred to me as his reading buddy. so since Mrs. Taylor was working on rhyming with her class i decided to give him the clue that my name rhymes with less and with mess. So he comes up with cress. interesting... so i said no.... it started with J. He goes... "jess, like jesse? (jess adds that there is a jesse in the class) but thats a boys name..." so i had to explain that if you spell my name the girl way theres an -ie at the end of it instead of just the -e. but it proved a point. names are gender oriented. the simplest name can be twisted and seen as strange in some contexts.
Diane's reading buddy has gathered an attitude recently as well. she had to be told a few times that she is not the boss, but reverse psychology calmed her down when Diane allowed her to take control of the word packet activity and let her tell Diane what words to change around.
my reading buddy had trouble focusing during the group observation, but he was better when we went into the hallway. we got our work done quickly so that we could play games, and like last week (i remembered what we did when Diane prompted me) when we were done, the four kids paired up and played Candy Land, although this game was much less stressful, the kids were more at peace with each other.
it was really amusing at the end, one of the girls in the class asked me if i worked at kohls in warwick... oddly specific right? well apparently she saw me at work the other day. I told her to come say hi next time she saw me because i never get visitors at work. small world isnt it.... lol... but Norbit is very excited that im going to be working with him for the rest of the year... its good when i can walk in and he gives me a big smile and a wave. also when i redid the dolch test with him he knew all of the words excluding a few up til third grade, but hes in second grade so thats fine... but i was so proud :) im doing my job... and he was proud... he kept trying to peek to see his words. he was disappointed that he missed some, so we worked on the first six he missed and he felt better when he realized that he knew a lot more then when we had first started. its a good feeling.

oops...

yeah so i was supposed to blog on the last time i met with Norbit, but i had to go to work straight from meeting with him... so i forgot until now.. and im in a really bad mood and the only thing i remember is that i asked him if he wanted me to continue meeting with him. he said he didnt want a new tutor, he said "you can stay" lol... nice.... so thats good... ill be staying on until the end of his school year... i believe diane will be for her reading buddy as well, they enjoy meeting with us so thats good... yeah.... sorry bout this...

Absolutely Normal Chaos (yeah its the name of a book)

ok... we all arrived to tutor around the same time today. four of us... and one of the other girls comes back from the room and tells us all that Mrs. Taylor is not in and the kids have all been split up around the school until she gets there around 11. So we decide to have the kids meet us at the office so that we can still meet with them for the day. The principal had the list of all the classrooms where the kids were, so she had the secreteries call them down. The lady from the VIPS program said she would meet with her kid on Friday so she left... about 2 minutes later her reading buddy came to the office... the poor thing was so confused... Norbit was absent today... so i decided to take the VIPS lady's buddy. Once we had all of our buddies, we were put in a classroom to work. We are not supposed to be left unattended with students, but the principal told us that if we wanted we could keep the door open and teachers would check on us when they walked down the hallway, which they did frequently... it was basically no different then any other day... or so we thought... the kids were absolutely nuts... they were pulled out of these classes... my buddy for the day, Kwami, was placed in a 6th grade classroom for the morning, hes in second grade. he was very quiet at first, which is understandable because it was a very confusing morning, and it didnt help that i was very unprepared for his skill level. He moved much quicker than Norbit and he was on a much more advanced reading level. he quickly became bored with my activities and we spent time going over books about science, which was really cool. he was very interested in math, so we worked on his times tables..... he can multiply through the 5's, most of the 6's, and some of the 7's and 8's... it was crazy... he became very animated and chatty once we struck an interest. he is extremely intelligent, and he was very let down that his tutor left (because of course miss latte had the brilliance to say outloud "oh... i feel so bad... she left...."). i made up the excuse that she had errands to run and that she told me to tell him that she promised she would see him on friday, he seemed much better after that. the other kids were not so well behaved. Diane had to tell her buddy repeatedly that if she did not do her work she was going back to class... Miss Latte's buddy was off the wall.... and the fourth girls buddy was on the cranky side... with their head teacher not in the building they were a whole different set of kids.... there was no control. we even walked them back to their other classrooms because we didn't trust them to not wander off. Kwami walked into the wrong classroom, and when he finally found the right door, he was in a class with kids who could have taken me on with a good fight.... it was nuts... poor little quiet kwami with the big scary kids. but yeah... he didnt seem intimidated.... he just bounced inside and sat down. lots of confusion today.... hope friday is better....

Pumpkin Muffin Pandemonium!!!

yeah so... instead of the kids doing word wizards this morning, mrs. taylor decided that they were going to bake pumpkin muffins.... it was a really good idea, and we figured it would be a lot of fun to help the kids out... what made it really amusing is that technically baking is not allowed in Fortes because the people in charge believe it takes away from reading and writing... but hell why not...

the kids with reading buddies got to go first, so of course the five kids who were privileged were more excited then anything ive ever seen, Norbit felt he needed to shoot me a huge smile and a big thumbs up... then they went to wash their hands (twice) and get the ingredients off the table... Norbit was in charge of adding the three spoons of oil... the worst episode was when Akasha tried to crack the egg, she picked it up to see if it had cracked and half of the egg white fell out on her shirt and on the floor. she managed to save the yoke though... and the batter looked like it was fine... they got to spoon it out into little ceramic pots to be baked in the cafeteria oven.

well that set the kids off. diane and i had volunteered to take on Josiah as well today because his reading buddy wasn't going to be there. you would have thought he would behaved for us, not the case... if anything he was even more off the wall. there was definately jealousy between Norbit and Akasha, at one point Akasha said to Josiah that Diane was her reading buddy, not his... much possessiveness here. Norbit and Josiah also do not play well together when they are playing games. Competition is crazy. A few times I had to grab the game pieces and have Norbit explain to me why i had stopped the game. He knew he was misbehaving, Josiah didn't care. Josiah just seemed to want to get Norbit wound up.

We're gonna clap our crazies out...... orrrr not....

holy god... maybe todays tutoring session reflected my conflict that i am currently having versus my high school friends, but today just felt absolutely insane!!! the kids were so rambunctious that the teacher actually had to come out and tell them to calm down because the classes around us were being disturbed. a few times i had to tell Norbit he needed to calm down or he would be returning to class. as promised we didnt write today much to his relief, and i had him read to me instead. also we worked on second grade candy land for the first time. he handled those words better than he handled the first grade words... it was rather amusing... we also attempted to work on the "nonsense words fluency" matching game that we were given... only problem being the kids could see right through the copies of the cards and could find the matches wayyyy too easily. so i have to fix that today after im done blogging...

it was also rather amusing that the infamous miss latte was talking to another of the girls in the program, saying that their 15 hours were done, so they were done.... and i felt i should inform them that if they read their packets carefully, the reading buddies program was 25 hours of community serice... to which she responded with "well you must be confused, the school of ed is 25 hours..." like i dont know what im talking about.... so of course she checked her packet, and VOILA!!! 25 HOURS!!! dumb blond... but instead of doing the right thing and sticking with it with her reading buddy, she instead says to the other girl "do you think we could finish our hours somewhere else?" like what the hell are they here for?? obviously they are not here to help the students, they are here to help themselves, which i find truly disgusting... if you dont want to help kids learn, then why the hell are you in an education program??? Diane and I are the only ones who don't run out the door on our buddies after our time is up, we hang around to talk to mrs taylor so that we can let her know the areas that we can see improvement in, and also to get feedback on how they are improving in class... we are also (most likely) the only ones who are genuinely interested in staying on after our 25 hours are done so that we can continue to help our buddies... we have bonds with them... obviously better ones then the other tutors have... im sorry.... im very aggravated with crap like this... its absolutely rediculous.... and if you havent seen this about me before... dang... you gotta start reading more!!!

Goodness Gasseous....

ok so let me just start with the fact that my reading buddy did nothing but fart while he did his work today.... ok now that that is out of my system... i can talk about everything else...

i was very pleased when i came in today and Norbit had the "Word Watcher" symbol next to his name and another word on the board... which basically means hes used 6 words!!! i was so excited!!! then the kids did this thing where the teacher put on a cd with sing-a-long songs for a big book... but the song was weird... it was called "Loud Blows the Wind", sung to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel". Basically the task was to identify all of the long "o" sounds in the book, given that they had to find the "oa" and "ow" sounds.

Once we got the reading buddies outside, I found that Norbit was in a very good mood, and he was wide awake, which was a big change from last week when he was constantly tired. We did the cube activity again, and because the paper cube had withstood two uses, i promised him he could crush the cube when we were done. He really must have wanted to stomp on the cube cuz he did his assignment in under 5 minutes.... and i told him to take his time. After he did his words out and wrote his sentances, we worked on the word packet thing... he aced A21 so we moved onto A22 right away. he stumbled a few times but i think it was more because he wanted to move onto another activity... stay on one thing too long and he gets bored...

i also told him that if he aced all the words in the first grade candy land (and didnt cheat) that we would attempt to do the second grade candy land on friday... he didnt cheat for the first game and tried so hard not to cheat on the second game that i let him cheat on the third game... by that time we had 5 minutes left so we just played with the colors anyway.

don't know what else there is to say.... i had a comment about something that happened in class but i didnt get a chance to write it down before going with our buddies, and now ive forgotten... yeah... so that didnt work....

A missed post

Yesterday was sorta crazy in that I went from tutoring to work to bowling... and when I got home at 11:30 I forgot to post on my blog... but I'll do it now I suppose. The classroom observation went well.... they were doing their "word wizard" words, and I was very excited that Norbit had four words on the board!!!! He got two more from the time I last saw him... which is awesome. The class then read a book and made a lost of the long e words that they could find... under the categories of "ee" and "ea"... they did really well, but some of them took the easy way out and used "leaves" after someone had already put "leave" and just argued that "leave" did not have an s on the end. It was rather amusing actually. Then the kids were given a word search to do on veterans day... which was really distracting for the tutors because the kids only wanted to do that... it was like a game to them.

The kids were absolutely evil... we don't know if it was because they have a long weekend, or what the deal was... but everybody seemed to be catching flack from the kids.... I got a lot of "I don't want to do that"... and it wasn't because Norbit was tired today... he was wide awake... one of the other kids Josaiah.... (again, not a real name but I couldn't think of any more from the movie...) was so hyper he was like that freakin' crazy squirrel in "Over the Hedge"..... it was a little bit like this.... sodoyouwantmetogetyouatimercuziknowwheretheyareandillgetoneandyoucanhavethisblueoneandhereillshowyouhowtoworkitohyouhavecoloredpencislwowcaniborrowonecanicanicani???
yeah it was a little like that.
I had to make Norbit understand that for me to help him with his word search we had to get our own work done first..... which he did as fast as he could lol..... and he did it correctly too which was awesome. I had him read to me today... and he wasn't very fluent, he sounded very robotic and unsure. Something we will have to work on... its funny, they call it the Reading Buddy program, but it should be more like writing buddies... we're more encouraged to help them with their spelling and their writing of words... it was difficult.
We returned them to class after and Diane and I came to the conclusion that the reason that Friday's are so tough for us is because there are at least 6 tutors out in the hallway at a time... on Wednesdays there are only three... with so many kids and tutors out there, the mood changes from one to where they want to learn, to one where all they care about is the fact that they are all out there with friends. It is good to know that they like us coming to see them though... one kid walking down the hallway stopped to make fun of his younger brother who has a reading buddy, and Diane's buddy countered with "Yeah, well do YOU have a reading buddy? huh? tell me... I didn't think so..." it was really kind of funny to see her defend herself and the rest of us like that... it lets us know they care.