10 Must Have Classroom Essentials- Part 2

Part 2:

Problem: Writing on completed student work and communicating with students (and parents) about the work.

As my students were completing their work I would write notes, abbreviations in various coloured pens for work that was complete, incomplete, needed to be corrected or I had worked with them. I found it was taking lots of time and the abbreviations I was using may not have been clear to parents when they looked through their children's work.

I wanted some personalized stamps of some kind and found these amazing self inking ones that I was able to make into exactly what I wanted. 

These save me SO much time and help the students quickly fix anything that needs to be changed as well as keep parents in the loop so they know if work was completed with teacher assistance. I just can't live without these now! I got them from Rubber Stamps, they have a great selection, I want to make so many more! See you next week for part 3!

Writing Rubric

I have seen these writing rubrics floating around pinterest, and I just had to make one for my class! It seemed as though there were many students rushing through their work, and completing it just to be done. When asked if it was their best work, they would always reply, You Bet!! I knew that they could improve, but it was difficult to explain how to do that.

The 4 star rubric works like a CHARM!! I can't believe how much they improved just by doing this. We talked as a class what each level would look like and then I made the rubric.

Here is some of their writing...so proud!!

Mrs. Dunn

Assessment, Report Cards and Mark books OH MY

With report cards coming up, I figured my next series of posts would be on assessment ideas that I use in my classroom.

We have changed reporting systems this year quite a lot so an update of my ever changing mark book was in order.

Today I am going to only write about work habits; how I keep track and what it looks like on the report card.

We have five work habit categories, and then students receive 4-1, 4 being the highest and 1 being the lowest. I know a lot of teachers say that they innately know where there students are and don't assess for this, but I just can't help myself, I have to have a mark for it.

I use a weekly assessment to tell parents how their children are doing in math, with sight words as well as work habits. You can find this how was my week document here. It's a freebie! This way there are no surprises with the report card as little "Jonnie boy" has had 2's the entire two months in works independently, so there are no questions about the report card

Then I record in my mark book by just putting a check mark in the correct column. When it comes time for report cards, I just go down the list and mark in the number that they have the most check marks in. Pretty simple!

Mrs. Dunn

Documenting Learning in Math

Today we were talking about how a number stays the same no matter what the arrangement of objects looked like. I used whole brain teaching to start, MIRROR, showed them how to arrange, then, TEACH OK, students showed each other how the number stays the same, then back to our desk to work with a partner.

SOOO I had this idea that I would film them as they were working with a partner. I normally just walk around and shout things like, DON'T put that counter up your nose or can you PLEASE not make alien pictures and do your job. Today students were actually pretty well on task, so I grabbed my camera and started filming.

The results were very interesting. I noted that many students were still counting to determine how many, even though their partner had just rearranged the counters. 

My thought is that tomorrow's math lesson, I will show them a video example of students  working with a partner and NOT having to count to know how many. Then we will discuss what we see and try again. 

Thoughts? How do you document student understanding in math?

Mrs. Dunn

Rubric for Writing

I always find it difficult to assess student writing, and self assessment is even more difficult when students are just beginning to read and write. Here is a picture of how I assess story writing; the students fill most of it out on their own by the end of the year.

Mrs. Dunn