Intern Year: Fall 2013: Week 10

In my third grade math support group, the students are learning how to subtract 3-digit from 3-digit numbers with regrouping.  I have been using a hundreds chart with them, but they still struggle sometimes with when to regroup.  In general education classroom, they learned a squaring off strategy to use.  It is where when you have to regroup, you put a square around the top numbers in the hundreds and tens place and take one away from it.  Then you regroup the ones and add ten to it.  It basically skips a step for the regrouping process.  On one hand, I feel like it is a good strategy for the students to use to decrease the chance of them making an error while regrouping.  On the other hand, I feel as if it is just strategy and the students are not learning the actual meaning of regrouping.  I am torn on this strategy.
I am also seeing that the reading support time with my third graders is sometimes used as a time to catch students up on all the work they did not finish in the general education classroom.  I am wondering if that is what the reading support time is supposed to be used for?  Or should I be working with them on the content they are learning in general education, not just catching them up and making sure they finish all of their work.

This was a little bit of a crazy week for both the students and the teachers.  This week was spirit week.  Each day was a different theme (mismatch day, camo day, ugly tie day, school wear day).  So this made for an interesting week.  On Tuesday, it was an early release day.  So the students started to eat lunch at 10:30 and left by 11:40.  So there was an hour and a half of instruction.  On Thursday, there was a 30 minute program for the United Way.  There were many disruptions during instruction this week.  Don’t get me wrong, I feel that there should be some fun things throughout the school year to reward the student and give them a small break from discussion.  However, this week the instruction was minimal, and I feel as if I did not accomplish what I wanted to with the students this week.  Even so, they still have to take their spelling and reading tests today.  I feel like there needs to be better planning to make sure the students are receiving the amount of instruction time they need and eliminating the distractions of instruction.