Days 2 & 3

1. Quick write: What are your first impressions of 7th-grade? About this class?

2. 10 question quiz on the syllabus and policies and procedures. This is graded in-class so students understand how I want them to self-grade.

3. Next we fill out our Assessment Charts. This is a form I have my students fill out all year. It is a way for them to get a visual of how they are doing on assessments and set goals for future assessments.

4. I show the students my website and explain how they and their families will be able to check grades throughout the semester.

5. Students are given a piece of cardstock on which to write their name and decorate. On the back they write their birthday. I use these throughout the year to celebrate birthdays.

6. Students work on a scavenger hunt to become acclimated to their textbook.

Second hour–students finish the project from yesterday and then create a collage showing all of the items they purchased.

Day 3–students take the inventory test to ensure proper placement in their math class as well as inform me of their skills.

By Day 4, we are into the curriculum!

First Day of School

Here’s the agenda for my first day of school along with links to activities. If you need them, please enjoy and make them your own! I’d appreciate any new ideas you have as well.

1. Short t/f quiz about me. After students grade and I introduce myself, they make a t-chart of what they learned about me vs. what they still want to know about me. This gives me a fun way to share a little about myself with students, they get to ask questions about me without speaking in front of everyone on the first day, and I see what kind of retention/note taking skills they come to me with.

2. Next, I move students to their assigned seats, where they begin filling out Who Am I, which I acquired from Dan last summer.

3. On the back of Who Am I is their first homework assignment. The Scholar Paragraph is acutally an assignment for an adult at home. It is a chance for parents/guardians to tell me anything I need to know about their student. The kids get a kick out of the fact that their parents get the first homework assignment.

4. Next each student is given a note card. On it, they list their first and last name, home phone number, and e-mail address. I also have them list all the first and last names of adults who live with them, how they are related, and if they know, their e-mail addresses as well as cell phone numbers. This is to avoid the awkward “may I speak to Mrs….” Where you don’t know what last name to use because many guardians do not have the same last names as their students. This is also my new plan for parent calls. During the day, if I need to call a student’s family for either a praise or corrective, I pull the card and jot down a quick note. At the end of the day, I just go through the cards on my desk. We’ll see how it works. This is a new plan I’m trying out this year.

5. We quickly go over the syllabus.

6. Students learn to take Cornell Notes while I “lecture” about our classroom procedures. On Day 2, students will have a quiz over these notes.

#1-6 easily fill an hour class period. The following activities are for my class which is two hours.

7. People Find. Students are typically sad about being in math for 2 hours from day 1. I try to include activities from the beginning so they understand they won’t be sitting bored for two hours for the entire year. This activity gets them up and meeting others in the room.

8. Cost of Going Back to School is a new thing I’m doing this year. I’ll give them this worksheet as well as ads from the newspaper. They’ll be working on math and in small groups on day 1.

9. Lastly, these students will write a letter to themselves about their goals and ideas about 7th-grade. They alone will read them and seal them in an envelope. Then at the end of the year, I’ll return the letters, and they will see how much they’ve changed.  This is also new for this year, so we’ll see how it goes.

Work in progress

A fellow teacher and I recently went over how our 7th & 8th-grade math teachers input classwork/homework into the grade book. I’m pleased with how we’ve decided to change things. For the most part, it follows the main ideas of standards-based grading, without ignoring our district principals about homework. Next on my list is tackling the assessment situation, but that will have to wait until after Rwanda.

In the meantime, I’ve enjoyed revamping my first day of school activities and playing around with SMARTboard lessons. I’ve found some great resources and am taking things and making them my own. In these last few days before leaving for Rwanda, I will go into my classroom to decorate (pictures to be posted later), and continue to steal ideas and mold them to be my own. Sharing is caring, and I care about you a lot, so I will be posting ideas and activities as they come.

Hybrid Standards-Based Grading

So after doing much reading and research, I have a tentative plan for hybrid SBG in my class this year. I’m hoping several people will read this link and help me with feedback, because part of me thinks my plan will fall on its face.

My district will not allow me to completely eliminate classwork/homework from the grade at the MS level. However, students already get C/NC solely based on completion, not correctness. I do think i will stop giving zeroes for missing work rather, but twos instead. After reading about proportions etc, and justifying to myself that students begin enough of the assignments in class to merit a two has lead me to this change. After crunching some numbers in a faux gradebook, it seems like that would raise a kid’s grade that little smidgen at the end of the term from perhaps an F to a D-. This is a problem our department faced this year, and I want to see what kind of difference it makes.

My plan for tests is to implement SBG. Each test will have a list of the standards covered on the test, and students will get a grade of 1-4 on the standards covered. Any student can come in for tutoring on a topic they received a 1 or 2 on and then take a re-test. If s/he shows mastery of the standard on the re-take, I will adjust their grade accordingly. Here are my fears with this…
-If many students come for this opportunity, how will I find the time to help all of them?
-Is it necessary to keep track of their previous scores, or just their highest?
-Should the re-take be of higher difficulty? How many problems? etc.
-7th-grade covers a plethora of standards. I haven’t sat down to look at the assessments yet, but I fear several tests may cover quite a few standards. Perhaps that means I should break them up?
-Many 7th-grade standards are quite compounded. When I grade, should I separate them based on objective then? If so, that really will create a large list per test.

The other problem is quizzes. I’m not quite sure what to do about them. Should they be SBG as well? Or should they be graded the traditional way? Tests are weighted 10x more than quizzes in our department, so they have a much smaller effect on grades to begin with, but I’m still not sure what to do with them.

Any thoughts, criticisms, or suggestions are welcomed as I’m really trying to craft a plan that will work best for my students, me, and my school/district.

Professional Development Summer Reading

I’ve read Chapters 1-4 of Daniel Willingham’s _Why Don’t Student’s Like School_. Here are my thoughts so far…

Chapters 1 & 2 seemed to be a good reminder of much of what I learned in my credentialling courses. I thought over the concepts of cognitive hooks, frontloading, chunking, prior knowledge, and scaffolding. However, the read was a good reminder about these topics. I think in the past couple of years, I have not provided enough background knowledge and basic facts to really empower my students enough to solve complex problems. They haven’t been given enough cognitive hooks to really chunk information together and use it more productively.

Chapters 3 & 4 were much more interesting. In chapter 3 Willingham discusses the fact that students need to think about concepts by linking together basic facts and knowledge. Thinking really occurs when students are able to understand the relationships between those facts and knowledge. They understand even more when they think enough to apply knowledge to additional situations. He also provides interesting insight to how you gain student interest into a lesson. The most important thing for me here was not to use a “hook” that would distract the students from the content of my lesson for the rest of the period.

Chapter 4 discussed why students struggle with learning abstract ideas. Though Willingham did not provide the answer to this mystery (I wish), he did provide some ideas. The most important for me here was to expect students to think deeply about topics. If I only ask them knowledge and comprehension level questions on assessments, they will see that I do not value them actually thinking deeply about a concept.

I hope to finish the book before I leave for Rwanda in two weeks, so more updates to follow!