Use Your Words

Does anybody else do AIMSWeb testing? Our school does - we have a reading assessment - it's basically words per minute, but it has some fancy-pants name I can't remember right at the moment, and we have two math assessments - a computation one and a concept one. 

Well, after we give the kids the assessments and enter their results, we can get these beautiful reports that are called Rainbow reports - well, at least that's what they are called at my school. And white is way above average, blue is above average, green is in the average range, yellow is below average and red is way below. {I'm pretty sure that "way below" is not the technical term, but you get the idea, don't you?}

The other day, our team was looking at all our reports so we could give some data to our literacy coach, and one team member was pretty down about how her class was looking on the rainbow report. 

And then a few days later, I was reading Shauna Niequiest's blog and she had a post called "Use Your Words." {I'm thinking that maybe this should be my phrase of the year - and who cares if it's February when I'm figuring that out!}

Anyway, in her blog, Shauna says she ran into an old friend and at the end of the conversation, he says "I'm proud of you." She talks about how wonderful it was to hear him say that. And his surprise that she wasn't hearing that all the time. 

So I was thinking about my colleague - I think she's a great teacher. She's energetic, she really does give her all for her kids, she's creative and thinks of all sorts of wonderful ideas. 

And - - - I meant to write her a note Monday and tell her, but forgot. Today! Today is the day I'll do that. What about you? Who can you encourage - a student that needs it, a colleague who needs to hear how you respect her/him? Maybe today is the day they need you to use your words!