What a Relief!!!

Technically our first quarter is over.  I do have one more week before report cards are to be sent home.  Our kids have taken their first quarter round of district benchmark testing.  The aggregated (weighted) scores are in.  I'm blogging this at 10:15 at night because I'm feeling darn good.  Darn good.

Within the last 3 weeks my class finally found their niche, their routine, their compromise to my expectations.  It is as if something clicked in everyone's minds. My troubled student and I had several chats and heart-to-hearts and he is a changed man...it is like night and day and my colleagues can't believe that he is no longer on my radar.  I find him trying to impress me now and working to show me he CAN do it. I love it!!!

I just braved our district's testing site to see if our data was in and...drumroll, stomach butterfly moment, or perhaps a stomach dropping moment later...there it was!  My kids are doing well!  What a relief and a reason to celebrate.  All that work that I felt was not working is.

I only have about 8 kids who are not meeting or exceeding the quarter 1 standards!  While normally, this number is much less in my classroom, this is something to still celebrate...with a difficult group of kids who I have struggled with...I am extremely happy to see these results!

There have been moments where I have been so behind in our lessons that I thought I was completely letting them down.  We had to work so hard on getting transitions down to less than 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes, going over and reviewing our classroom rule and expectations, stopping to address things like, "He took my pencil," "She shortcutted me in line," etc., that I honestly did not think my kids would be able to pass our benchmark tests.  As the gifted cluster class, my students and I are normally ahead of everyone else and we work at a much faster pace, so this was a tough and confusing quarter for me.  I was thrown off my game over and over again.

Did I do a good job this quarter though?  No, I could have done so much better.  Will I be able to do better for my students next quarter...heck yes!  I know exactly what I need to do to help them achieve and become even better learners.  There is still so much work ahead of us, but at least I know they are reacting to my expectations and truly rising to the occasion.

So, I am relieved to say the least.  I am celebrating!...with some gifs!

as well as

with a little bit of

So, how about you?  What are you celebrating?