When It ‘Clicks’

LSEM > stories > Wow Story > When It ‘Clicks’

When It ‘Clicks’

  • January 8, 2025
  • Posted by: Caitlin McCallum
  • Category: Wow Story
No Comments

This year, I have had two of the 8th graders in my class for the last two years. In the past two years, due to the schedule, I have only worked with them on reading skills. Both have huge attention issues but are not officially diagnosed.

This year, they have both matured a great deal and are much more aware of why learning to read and do math are both important. Based on the diagnostic testing done at the beginning of the year, we have been focusing part of our lesson on multiplication facts, two digits by two plus digits. In their general ed math class they are working on unit rates and comparing unit rates.

One day their gen ed math teacher announced that they were going to have multiplication quizzes at least once each quarter. The first time a multiplication quiz was given, one of these two girls came into my room. She excitedly said “ Hey, Ms. Hathaway, those facts really helped. I got a 100% on my quiz!”

She was so surprised that she could do so well and was pleased that her work in the resource room really paid off.

My other 8th grader has really been working on getting homework done, completing things on time, and actually doing the work that we are doing in the resource room. Due to illness, she was the only student for two days as we worked on unit rate, graphing rates of change, and word problems solving these problems. She was so excited that she understood this, that she wanted to explain it to the other student. She did a really nice job of explaining the math needed to solve the problems.

One of my 6th graders who was a new student to Concordia last year, was incredibly behind in reading skills. She still wants to skim over words rather than decode them. I see her and another 6th grader as a group by themselves because they read at such a much lower rate than all my other 6th graders. We were working through some questions by matching subjects with verbs that were part of a reading we read as a group over the last two weeks. She finally ‘heard and understood’ me say to re-read the text headings or look at the photos/captions as you are looking for the answers. She had a couple of great successes at skimming the headings and also actually reading the captions with the photos and finding the pertinent information without much support. She looked up and said, “Oh, that really helps when you read every word. That makes so much more sense now!”

~written by Linda Hathaway, LSEM Teacher at Concordia Lutheran School in Fort Wayne, IN