Grades Search Results

Episode 57: Nine Simple Solutions for Common Teaching Problems

…thing in education has been assessment, and the idea of de-emphasizing traditional grades and eventually going gradeless, and the subtitle of that book is “Ten Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grade School.” And I’ve written a lot of about this, and years ago I started a Facebook group called Teachers Throwing Out Grades, which has almost 7,000 people in it now from around the world. And at last count I think it was like nearly 200 countries represented, and these are people who say, “We don’t like traditional grades. We don’t want to label kids. We don’t to…

8 Ways to Grow Students’ Vocabulary

…segments of the preschool elementary day like snack time, lining up to go to lunch, and restroom breaks. It also has potential for older students. Strategy 2: Anchored Word Learning Anchored Word Learning (Beck, McKeown, & Kucan, 2002) is ideal to use with elementary students where read-alouds are typically part of the daily routine. It can also be used in the upper grades, especially with complex text that is being read aloud and discussed together as a whole class. For young children, picture books provide excellent sources of higher-level, sophisticated words that are important for expanding vocabulary. They expose students…

Episode 171: Does Your School Need a Literacy Check-Up?

…to make sure we’re paying attention to those five pillars of reading instruction that have been around since the National Reading Panel’s report in the year 2000. So that is phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, reading comprehension and then also vocabulary development. So what I’ve shared here, everything in the book is broken into different levels, so there are four levels. The early years we call it, and that’s grades pre-K through 2, elementary grades 3 through 5, middle years roughly 6 through 8, and then high school 9 through 12. So what’s in the blog post for the pre-K level…

Why is my kid allowed to make spelling mistakes?

…once. After they master letters and build them into words, their next step is stringing those words together into complete ideas. That takes a lot of mental work, and trying to spell every word perfectly can slow the whole process way down. For this reason, many teachers in the early grades encourage inventive spelling, also known as temporary spelling — where the child makes his best guess on the spelling of the word, rather than stopping to find out the correct version. This practice is grounded in research. A number of studies demonstrate that kids who are allowed to use…

Should My Child Skip Kindergarten?

…as well. So even if everyone didn’t know that I skipped a grade, I probably still would have had difficulty socially. And I remember having difficulty navigating friendships and cliques all the way through, but especially in middle school and early high school (doesn’t everyone have difficulty in that age group?). By sophomore year of high school, it just didn’t matter as much. There was the opportunity at that point to take classes with students from other grades, lunch was with all grades, and all of my extracurricular activities were with students from all grades – so my friend groups…

How to Write a Syllabus

…post, I will share what I include in my own syllabi. I refined my own model over time, pulling from various sources and modifying things through trial and error every semester. It’s certainly not the only way to write a syllabus, but what I can say with certainty is that I had very few issues every semester in terms of students not understanding what was expected of them. No debates over how I calculated grades. No misunderstandings about when assignments were due. And even those few times, I was able to point those students to the syllabus, which they just…

Let’s Talk About the Leader in Me

…in Grades K-3, the language of Leader in Me is not developmentally appropriate since the students really don’t have sufficient life experience to understand the terms. Show me a student who really understands what it means to be “Proactive” in the younger grades, and I’ll show you a student who is talented and gifted beyond their years. We had a great Character Education in place already which we had to scrub to make room for Leader in Me. Leader in Me is not for kids, it is for adults who want to have bragging rights about how artificially special their…

Should You Switch Grade Levels?

…you have a music and p.e. specialist to work with, or will you be expected to teach those content areas to your class? Will you be expected to rotate with teaching partners and get to focus on teaching a few content areas, or will you teach all content areas to your class of students? When I moved from the middle grades down to kindergarten, it was the hardest switch I’ve ever made. I found going down in grades to be trickier than going up, but if you review their developmental stages, their need for scaffolding and support will be less…

Introducing the HyperRubric: A Tool that Takes Learning to the Next Level

…it to a lot more than I was used to.” Frieden limits his use of the HyperRubric to certain types of assignments. “If you’re a teacher listening to this and you’re thinking, oh, that sounds like I have to set up an entire trimester geared towards that and I’m not ready for that. I’m actually using the HyperRubric as one point in a particular type of assignment.” What about grades? If these are meant to be progressive, how and when do you actually assign students a grade? Rablin bases a lot of his grades on conferences with students. “Our conversations…