School Spirit

Yes, I know. The NAPLAN (National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy - and a partridge in a pear tree) finished up yesterday with the final component of the four all done and dusted by recess. I did have to send one of the kids off to sit a make up test booklet this morning for missing Wednesday’s part, but other than that, it’s all over. Today was Friday though. Friday after NAPLAN. Friday after three solid days of pretty full-on, heavy-handed, don’t-talk-or-I’ll-rip-your-tongue-out-and-feed-it-to-the-cat-work. So what else could we do?

Our entire week’s worth of Learning Centres on Rainforests, of course. I mean… the next grade will be expecting them first thing Monday, and we’ll get two weeks worth of work on the local town by then too. We have to fit them in somewhere, eh?

So this morning I photocopied up everything we’d need, sat them all out on a table, gave them all a quick run through on what each of the four activities was about, made sure they realised there were only a certain number of books or pamphlets for each activity to go around, and then said ‘right, pick one and get into it’.

Of they went. Some finished two activities before recess, some finished three. Others typed up their reports on the excursion the other week. All in all, it was a quiet two hours of ‘do-what-you-like-as-long-as-it’s-work’ morning. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t bring myself to sit them down and run them madcap through as much work as we could fit in. It was more… well, I’ll be honest… after NAPLAN even I needed a quiet, easy morning.

Anyway, the kids appreciated it, and we actually got a fair bit done. So I guess there was merit in it, eh?

Maths though… maths would be a poser. Not a whole lot prepared, and once again, I wasn’t quite prepared myself to start anything particularly new on a Friday. So we played a few maths games.

All together.

On the floor.

In a space about four metres square.

With a score and change of excited, competitive kids.

Yes, it was noisy.

Which means it was a helluva lot of fun!

Free time after lunch, and then we draw the weekly raffle tickets, add up the table points, reward the winning table, and check if our combined points beat our previous high score. For an End Of NAPLAN Week reward, I had a bag of Fruit Tingle rolls to hand out when they broke the record (cos they were going to this week, I’d make sure of it!), but they didn’t know they were coming. They had to win though… you had to make sure they were proud of everything they’d achieved, eh?

I knew we were several hundred points behind by lunchtime, so I handed out points like they were Labor How-to-vote cards out the front of dodgy little election booths. What did I give them out for? Any kid who found something helpful to do. In fairly large amounts. The room hasn’t looked better since February!

Somehow though I miscounted and we were still 30 points away by the time we worked it all out. The kids let out disappointed sighs and I thought ‘bugger… mess that up’.

So I asked six easy questions from the last fortnight’s work and award five points each. New high score, kids go home loud and proud.

Sometimes you just need a day like that.

It’s over.

Well, I think it is. One of the kids was away yesterday and missed the Reading component so she might have to sit that on Friday, but otherwise, we’re finished. The Numeracy component was completed today and everybody breathed a sigh of relief. If the kid who missed yesterday has to sit it tomorrow, apparently she’ll sit a different version than the one we all did. Apparently that’s another ploy to beat those kids who talk about the questions. Not sure about that though. Will find out tomorrow.

Numeracy. Technically that’s everything to do with Number, but technically that’s only one part of the maths curriculum. Didn’t seem to matter. There was a fair spread of the other areas of the maths curriculum littered through the 12 pages of the test booklet as well.

‘Why didn’t they just call it maths then, Mr V?’ they asked, and quite appropriately.

‘You know my answer to questions like that by now.’

‘Oh. Because.’

‘Yep.’

This last one was to last 45 minutes, plus time at the start to run through the sample questions. Once again I photocopied the test (smaller) and gave it to the Fours as well so now I’ve got assessment evidence for both my Threes and Fours. Reports are starting… well… tomorrow, I suppose. Need all the evidence I can get. This time I photocopied the sample questions for them as well so at least they had something to do while we ran through them.

Forty five minutes this part was due to run for. The kids who finished early were now in the habit of closing their work over and finding something to carry on with quietly at their table. I threw a few of the Fours onto the computer to type up pieces of writing and rotated a few through that way as well. The rest contented themselves as they finished up with scratching away at unfinished work, colouring a few pictures or drawing a few of their own. By the time the countdown clock reached 10 minutes I realised something was amiss though.

‘Okay, Grade Threes. Hands up if you’re still working on the NAPLAN test?’

Not a hand to be seen.

‘Okay. We’re calling it quits ten minutes early. If you can stay this quiet then you can just keep doing what you’re doing until the time runs out.’

Once more, off around the oval to get the blood pumping again and five minutes going troppo on the jungle gyms then back inside, a few more chapters of the class serial, and twenty minutes left before recess.

‘Okay, troops. Keep it down and you can have some quiet free time till recess at your tables.’

At which point one of the kids approaches me with a suspicious look.

‘You’re planning something, aren’t you?’

‘No. Why?’

‘You’re being too nice today…’

Tomorrow… tomorrow I think we might have a bit of a lighter day. Start some work off, finish other bits, wind the week down slowly and enjoy a day with not quite so much full on work as these last three.

Friday on my mind.

The second day of NAPLAN testing (National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy - looks a little too much like NAPALM) played itself out today. On the agenda for today (done before recess, mind you! Just to stop any chance of the little tykes running up to their mates at recess and talking about the test!) was the Reading section for our Grade Three and Fives. I didn’t bother photocopying all of the paraphernalia needed for this quest for my Fours. They did some other language work instead, which, despite being a bit full by my standards, the kids thought was better than doing NAPLAN! A full 45 minutes allocated for the activity, along with the ten odd minutes it takes you to read out all the instructions (word perfect from the handbook every teacher is given - everybody has to have the same instructions, this is a standard test, after all) and it ends up taking a little longer. I was a little more prepared this morning though. I sharpened yesterday’s pencils before the bell went.

Not that I have a sharpener on my desk at all. Well… I very well possibly could. I could have anything on my desk. What I definitely don’t have on my desk is this thing called clear work space. So I opened up the first kids’ pencil case I could see and fished around for his sharpener. It was a cool little plastic robot face thing and you stick the pencil into either eye socket to sharpen it! The base is a concertina style thing that you can expand when it gets full to fit more sharpenings in. This is good because he can sharpen his pencil without leaving his table and has the added bonus of looking really cool! When he walked in as the music was going to start the day off, I handed it to him and said ‘thanks for your sharpener, oh, by the way, can I borrow it?’

Anyway… back to the all important Reading test. A test booklet to write their multiple choice answers into. A ’stimulus’ book (in plain kid speak, the book with the various little texts and stories they would read to answer the questions - we called it a ‘magazine’ because the kids reckoned ’stimulus’ was just trying to sound clever for the sake of it, and you only end up looking like a dill doing that). A sharpened pencil with an eraser on top (which for some reason squeaks every time a kid uses it…). And hopefully an awake mind ready to take this test by the horns and give it a good old shake.

Off you go, kids, work hard. Grade fours, thanks for waiting, I’ll come and see to all of those hands pointing up at the ceiling now.

Forty five minutes later, it’s all done and I’m only slightly discouraged by one or two kids who couldn’t seem to get the idea that ‘oh, you have to read the whole page of information to answer these questions? Oh, that makes more sense now!’ Once again, kick the kids outside for a run around the oval to get the blood pumping and let them be kids, and five minutes going off their collective faces on the jungle gym outside. Back in again, and we’ll read three more chapters of the class serial. Lots of laughter here due to a cane toad threatening to scratch a truck’s duco with a nail and drink all it’s petrol, and even more jocularity at same cane toad’s ability to turn himself into an outboard motor by eating stink weed and hanging his bottom over the edge of the esky lid they were floating on and into the water. Must give this book a review later!

There. Today’s NAPLAN piece is done. Send them all off to the office during recess, and we only have Numeracy to worry about tomorrow. But now… now we actually have time to do some NORMAL WORK! So we jump into maths and have a quick revision session on addition and subtraction (ie, just in time for tomorrow’s Numeracy test - if we didn’t do it now I KNOW they’d forget half of it tomorrow!) but this time we added in some decimal points. Scary stuff, those decimal points - until you talk about money. They ALL understand money.

Had a bit of fun talking about milliseconds though.

‘How long’s a millisecond, Mr V?’

‘Let’s see, eh?’

So I spend five minutes trying to start and stop my watch’s stopwatch as quick as I can. Fastest I could react was 12 hundredths of a second. They loved it!

Tomorrow… we start again, but this time for the last time.

Friday… Friday I think we’ll work on having fun.

And maybe trying to beat 12 milliseconds!

Today was the first of three days of NAPLAN testing. That’s the National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy test. Long name, needs punctuation.

On today’s menu was an early morning entrée of Language Conventions. They featured a side dish of spelling, a garnish of grammar and a whole lot of punctuation. Suggested serving size - 40 minutes. I photocopied the Grade Threes’ test this morning before they came in (shrunk down to fit two pages to a sheet, double sided to save paper) and gave them to the Grade Fours. Why give one test for half your kids when you can test the whole lot and then have assessment evidence for them all for when you write reports in the next few weeks? A few of the Fours finished it all within ten or fifteen minutes, but most of them used up the forty minutes suitably.

With the first of four tests done and packed away, one lap of the oval and five or ten minutes running madcap around the jungle gyms just outside the classroom to let them move and make some noise again. That’s one good side to being in a room separate from any others. You can let them run loose on the odd occasion without really interrupting anybody else. Then it was back inside to carry on our class serial novel and out to recess.

The second course was delivered just after recess. A forty minute Writing test. The topic - ‘Found!’ Write a narrative of your own using your own ideas or inspiration from the ’stimulus’ sheet (a flash piece with words, pictures and suggestions about the topic ‘Found!’ they all got to look at). Five minutes planning time (’What’s planning for?‘), thirty minutes writing time, and five minutes at the end to edit your work (’What’s editting for?‘). One change I noticed to this year’s new look tests is they can only write on the three pages they’re given. They used to be able to grab some extra paper and staple it to their booklet if they needed to write further. Not so this time. I suppose that cuts back on the kid who writes and writes and writes and forgets all about plot, character, interest and keeping the reader awake.

You know the stories I’m talking about. They’re often written by girls (no offense intended, but you can’t argue with the facts!) and often involve ALL of their friends and often either kittens or puppies who end up getting married and wear bows. All this spread over six pages of grade three handwriting with scant regard for spelling, full stops or indeed any of the general fundamental rules of English grammar!

Yeah. Those ones.

That all done, finish off, give all the kids and myself a lolly (because, come on, we deserved one!), pack the tables up, and outside into the sun for another five minutes of running around remembering what it’s like to be a kid again before lunch. Which, thanks to some great May sunshine, we had outside.

After lunch? Aw, we’ll just let the kids sit a Trivia Challenge, eh?

‘Can you help us with these questions now?’

‘Nup, can’t help you with these ones either. Just like NAPLAN.’

‘So… why’d you even bother comin’ to school, eh?’

‘Cheeky kids get clips over the back of the head!’

Once the day ended, I found myself sitting down at a table ticking through the photocopied grade three tests to see how they did, as well as the grade four tests as well. I’ll read the stories more closely tomorrow.

So yes. There was Day One of NAPLAN. First up, make them sit the Language Convention part. After recess, sit the Writing piece. After lunch, a Trivia Challenge just because it was the only time this week, and they’d be used to tests by now, eh? After work, correct through the Language Convention pieces.

After that? Off to Tuesday’s basketball match. No coach. Okay. Guess who spent the first two minutes of the game standing by the sidelines calling out ‘Shoot a goal! Shoot a goal!’ until the coach arrived? Yep.

And they actually got one too!

Then they went on to win the match 44 to 12.

I like to think my two minutes of coaching inspired them to greatness.

Tomorrow (Tuesday) we start administering the NAPLAN tests to all of the grade 3 and 5 kids. At least, those who haven’t been exempted under certain grounds such as intellectual disabilities and stuff like that. Oh, and not to those kids who aren’t actually at school either. Apparently there’s a catch up day on Friday for any kids that miss it, but that’s another issue later on. I’ve told the kids to inform their parents that there’s no homework this week because with all four of these fairly weighty tests the kids are going to be going through, they deserve a bit of slack and a week off. So do I.What’s the NAPLAN? It’s the National Assessment Program Literacy And Numeracy test. Last year it was called the AIM test, but for some reason now that it’s a national test and not just a Victorian one they saw fit to rename it and chose that monstrosity of a name as it’s new label. I tried explaining this to the kids last week when we were talking about it, but they wouldn’t have a bar of it!

‘What a stupid name! NAPLAN! Why couldn’t they just call it AIM again! At least that made a word! How stupid! etc etc’

While trying to appear all professional, I just couldn’t manage it and basically had to concede to the kids that, hey, I fully agree with you. It’s the same thing as last time with a new silly name. Like a change of government, in many respects, eh? Same stuff, different turkey.

Anyway… it’s happening tomorrow and I’ll be running the grade threes through their paces. The grade fours… well, they can do most of it as well. Why just collect data on my threes when I can collect data on my fours at the same time? It all goes towards assessment evidence for their reports anyway. Accountability, that’s what it’s called

‘Why did you give my son a bad mark in his maths??‘

‘Have a glance at this then, eh?’

‘Oh… yeah. Fair enough. He’s not that bright, eh?’

A Melbourne psychologist, in today’s Herald Sun newspaper, has ‘hit out’ at the tests, labelling them a waste of time and possibly harmful to the kids who sit them. According to his findings, they are ‘very bad at predicting individual achievements’ and ‘don’t measure what they are supposed to measure’. I don’t know if they’re quite a complete waste of time, but I do agree to an extent that you can’t base your kid’s academic abilities on this one test, however enormous it may be. The results the parents get back later in the year show a snapshot of their kid’s abilities, in that particular subject, on that particular day. If the kid works well with official tests and so forth, they’ll probably do well. If they’re a kid who looks at a big test and you can almost see their brain melt and ooze out through their ears while they’re sitting there, then they probably won’t do particularly well just now. I find it more useful to treat these tests, on a parental level, as a guide for whereabouts your kid is sitting against the rest of the state (or now, nation) and go from there. If you have issues or concerns, then approach the teacher and you’ll probably find there are reasons for particular scores and wander home somewhat more happy with the situation.

It’s one test on one day. If the kid crashes out on a spelling test once through the year, you wouldn’t get too worked up. If the kid’s not quite ready to work on the NAPLAN day, then they’re not going to do so well either. It won’t stuff up their entire year.

To be a little more serious for a moment though - tomorrow the kids are faced with two tests. Language Conventions (which has always been called Spelling and Punctuation until that changed this year) and Writing. Where do you put the talking marks? Would you use a question mark, a comma, a full stop or an exclamation mark at the end of this sentence? Which word best fits in the hole in the sentence? Stuff like that. A few spelling activities at the end and there you have it. I don’t know yet whether they’ll have the dictation task now. Will have to see about that one.

After recess they get to sit down for the Writing part - this year it’s a narrative or story, but that’s nothing new - it’s always a narrative. We’ve found that narratives are the hardest pieces for kids to write. If they aren’t reading lots of books or having them read to them, they just don’t have the imagination or grasp of language and sentence structures to know how to construct their own. Give them a piece where they can retell what happened to them last week, they can rabbit on all day! But ask them to write a story, and a lot of them either go into meltdown or hand in something that’s, as nicely put as possible, a repetitive, bland piece of work that shows little plot or character development. There are always a few stand outs, and a few that nicely surprise you, but you can usually pick the kids who haven’t had that background of stories poured into them growing up.

Parents! Read to your kids! As much as you can! Feed their imaginations!!

We do our best, but you can only spread so much imagination food around 25 kids, eh?

Wednesday morning they’ll all back again, this time for the Reading test. It checks comprehension mainly, which we’ve found is something the kids don’t always have by the time they reach grade three. In the first three years of school they generally work out how to say all the words, and many can read very fluently by the time they get to us at this level. They just don’t always have the comprehension that needs to go along with it. I know the teachers of these levels have been working more on that these last few years now, at least at our school, so that’s becoming less of a problem. This part of the test though, is one of the two that we find the kids will generally bomb out on. A booklet filled with various texts they’re to read then answer multiple choice questions about. If there’s a place they’ll freeze up and stress out, this is the one.

Finally, on Thursday morning, it’s into Numeracy. One last test, this time covering just about everything to do with maths. Like reading, if they’re going to bomb, it’s often in this one too. Often it’s just that the questions are asked in styles the kids aren’t used to and they just don’t understand what’s being asked. If we can get around to them (we’re allowed to read the questions for them in Numeracy but not in the others) then more often than not they pick up what they have to do and they’re right. You can’t always get around to each kid every time though.

We used to be able to do the tests on the specific days but at whatever time suited our programs. Apparently that was frowned upon because kids might then leave their classrooms at recess and talk about the questions with mates who hadn’t yet sat it, who’d then go in after recess and answer those questions when they sat the test. So now every school has to administer this test at the same times as every other school. Now… if you’re like me, you’ll see one major piece of silliness in this. What primary school kid in his right mind is going to sit through an hour long test, then go outside at recess for a well deserved run around and a bit of fun, and spend that time talking with his mates about the questions?

Whoever that kid is, he needs a good talking to about being a kid, eh?

But that leads to this last point I only just heard about today. Apparently, in case kids miss one of the days and therefore one of the tests, they can catch up and do that part on Friday. Obviously there’s no problem with talking to their mates about the test if it was a few days ago, eh? I know I’m being a little silly with this point, but it struck me as pedantic and yet somewhat obsolete.

Not to worry though. When we finally get through it all, despite this apparent obesity problem, I’m giving them all a lolly or two. They’ll deserve it.

So will I.