Free lunch and free breakfast are celebrated accomplishments for this school year; and rightfully so with many of the students coming from families that are in need of these services. 

 These observations will be of a fifth grade class that is compartmentalized and ability grouped all day.  They travel to Reading/Science/Lunch/Special Areas/ and Math together.  My first thoughts were; "Do they still do this in elementary schools"? I am in the classroom on a tutoring and mentoring capacity.  The reading teacher is in her first year of teaching 5th grade, and moved from kindergarten.  She is extremely open to advice and welcomes help in restructuring her reading classes.  All of the students reading scores have dropped drastically, and I will be assisting both the lowest and highest performing students in the areas of reading and language arts.  The make up of the lowest group is African-American, Haitian, Jamaican, Latino, and Caucasian; with African-American students making up the majority of the class population.  This first week I gave the students their own chapter books, and assigned a set amount of pages for each day with a goal of completing the book in one week.  As an educator, I have not seen this much excitement in students in a long time; it almost saddened me.  These are the only books these students have been able to have, hold, take home, and be responsible for this entire school year.  We will begin there!