End of Unit Assessment Trackers Now Available!

Please use these trackers to collect your assessment data. Once a unit is complete, just email me your file! For future reference, these trackers will be available on the pacing guide home page.

We are asking you to collect this data for three important reasons. First of all, the district has a vested interest in the achievement of our students as it relates to our day-to-day curriculum. Rather than rely on periodic data from the DACS or the DSTEP, for example, we can track student progress throughout the year on the very learning objectives we strive to teach each day.

Secondly, with data available on each question, we can pinpoint an area of difficulty and then determine whether there is an issue with the question itself, or with our instruction. This will help us refine the assessments from year to year.

Finally, our students are mobile. When a student transfers into a new classroom, a teacher can request previous assessment data and we can supply it.

Grade One Assessment Tracker

Grade Two Assessment Tracker

Grade Three Assessment Tracker

Grade Four Assessment Tracker

Grade Five Assessment Tracker

Grade Six Assessment Tracker

Grade Seven Assessment Tracker

Grade Eight Assessment Tracker

Work Ethic Rubric

Are you using a menu or workshop format in your math block? Working levels are designed to help raise students' awareness of their own behavior, to make expectations more explicit, and to give focus to discussions about what it means to work hard.

Students of all ages must be given opportunities to discuss questions like,

"What does it look like to work hard?"

"What does it look like to be responsible? What will we see? What will we hear?"

"How will we know when we're working hard?"

A working levels rubric gives students more information about what is expected and the information they need to improve.

Work Ethic Rubric

(from Working Levels by Kathy McGrath)

Level 4

• Productive
• Respectful
• Collaborates with Others
• Craftsmanship

Level 3

• Productive
• Respectful

Level 2

• Works when Reminded

Level 1

• Not Working

Level 0

• Interfering with Other's Work

The Cost of "Achievement?"

Making Sense of Division

When solving division problems, students are often able to produce a quotient without realizing what that quotient represents. For example:

The bag has 695 pieces of candy corn, and Alyssa wants to put them into bags of 50. How many bags will she need?

Students may be able to mechanically produce the quotient 13. But do they fully understand the referential meaning of "13"? And let's not even get started about what the remainder represents!

Explicitly teaching students, with a model, that there are two ways to think about division can help them develop powerful mental structures for analyzing their results. I'm going to suggest Cuisenaire Rods as an excellent model for representing division.

Sharing (partitive) division is the situation your students are most comfortable with because it can be solved by dealing out. In sharing division, we know the total and we know the number of groups. The unknown is the number of items in each group. We can solve this by dealing out, or sharing, all of our items one at a time until there are no more to be distributed.

Sarah has 10 puppies and 2 doghouses. How many puppies can be grouped evenly in each doghouse?

The Cuisenaire Rods offer a nonlinguistic representation of the situation. We have a given total divided into 2 groups. We must find the number in each group.

There will be 5 puppies in each doghouse.

In the second division situation, the action to solve the problem is making groups. This is called measurement division, and lends itself well to the idea of repeated subtraction - repeatedly removing groups of a particular quantity until there are no more to be removed.

Climb the Ladder!

Danylle, the 4th grade teacher at Hedog, is concerned about her students' fluency with base-10 concepts. We dug out her Kathy Richardson "Understanding Numbers: Place Value" kit and put together an effective (We hope!) set of activities for Menu.

It was funny, though, because our planning session began with me giving her an impromptu idea that seemed great at first, (Don't they all? Ha!) but looked more and more shabby the deeper we went into Kathy's materials.

Danylle proved her worth as a teacher, though, with unflagging encouragement! "I like your idea, Chris," she said. "I'm going to still use it."

Uh huh.

I left Hedog that afternoon determined to craft this idea into an activity that would produce results, and wouldn't look pitiful next to the other Menu items. I happened across some "Climb the Ladder" activities while browsing Mathwire.

Climb the Ladder was just the touch I needed! So I'm happy to share with you an activity that requires only a deck of digit cards and a work some activity sheets. This should be good for latter year second graders, third graders, and 4th graders who need further support or practice.

Note: The directions ask students to represent their number using squares, lines, and dots. This vocabulary was chosen for simplicity. These representations should be connected with the flats, rods, and cubes of the base-10 blocks, or to the sheets, strips, and singles of the Sticker Station.

Have fun!

Download: Climb the Ladder Base-10 and Place Value Concepts

I Have/Who Has Du Jour!

Do your students need practice with concepts or skills they are working to master? The I Have/Who Has activity is an engaging and motivating way for kids to gain fluency in small groups, with partners, or as a whole class. While they practice, you can check for understanding.

I have x + 1! Who has...

I have 1 ten and 4 ones. Who has...

Follow the break to download card decks and find out more about this activity.