Assessment with Manipulatives (Math 9)

Recently I gave my Math 9 students an option to use linking cubes to help them write a surface area quiz.  Immediately some students knew they would want to use the manipulatives and collected the cubes prior to the start of the test while others waited to preview the quiz first. In the end, all of the students used the cubes to help them complete the quiz. Interesting that when given the choice, the students utilized the manipulatives! 

Socials 11: Spy vs. Spy

This post is courtesy of Russ Reid.

During our August Pro-D I worked with Dave S. and Lesley L. brainstorming ways to improve understanding of the cold war for our grade 11 students. We all felt this was a challenging era to explain and understand. It was thought through competition (which in a nut shell was the cold war) a better understanding could occur.

This was my first time running the competition and I was nervous wondering if the kids would buy into it. Well I failed to remember how competitive teenagers are. I first divided the students into two groups - Soviets and Americans. Next time I would like to create a few sattelite states. We have had a few competitions along the way. The one they bought into hook line and sinker was the Spy vs Spy.

I asked two adults on staff to act as double agents. Each of them came up with a password. This password would then be used by the students to discover who their agent was. Once they found their agent, the agent would give them a document (a blueprint of a secret tank being built by the other nation). The students went around the school (on their own time) saying their password to adults (the two passwords were "The earth is blue" and "I love cuddling with Nellie"). One of my agents decided to bake a cake and hide the blueprints between the two layers. The video is of them discovering the document.

We also had a space race (building paper airplanes), trivia competition about the cold war, rock/paper/scissors competition. Next week they are going to watch a clip of a Russian Ballet troupe. They will be given time to practice and will have to perform in front of judges - Three Americans and Three Soviets. All the judges will be corrupt and will give Zeros or Tens depending on which nation is performing. I will also have a group boycott the event.

The hope is to give them a fun, practical way to understand the war. The students are also receiving notes, video and textbook questions to reaffirm their understanding.

Show What You Know-Test (Science 8)

This post is courtesy of Middle School Teacher Lindsay Guza: Today I decided to give my class a very non-traditional test. I gave the student the hand-out below and a large piece of blank, white paper.

Energy Flows and matter cycles in ecosystems

Chapter 2- QUEST

INSTRUCTIONS

On blank paper, please show me that you understand the concepts and ideas covered in this Chapter. You may write notes, a paragraph, drawings and/or diagrams.

BE sure to include labels and vocabulary from Chapter 2.

Concepts:

1. How energy gets into the living parts of an ecosystem.

a. Photosynthesis

2. How Energy gets transferred in an ecosystem.

a. Food Chains

b. Food Webs

c. Ecological Pyramids

3. How Water cycles through the non-living parts of an ecosystem.

a. The water cycle

THANK YOU AND GOOD LUCK!

I was not in the class, as I was doing my planning, but it worked out even better than I had imagined. Here are some examples.

Student #1 often gets assistance from an adult to write tests and do work.  Today he did this test independently! 
Food Chain:


Water Cycle with ALL of the vocabulary:


Photosynthesis with ALL of the vocabulary:


Student #2:  During the last Science test, this student did not answer half the questions even though she knew many of the answers.  Today, she completed this test with no extra help or encouragement. 


Food Chain:





Student #3 always excels at tests and written work. She was able to demonstrate her learning in a new way. She was also given the opportunity to show more than she would have been able to on a traditional test.

Choice Power: Grade 4

This post is courtesy of Kent Percevault.

Our class is currently doing a read aloud novel together. After hearing the chapter(s) each day we do a reading response. I have taught several different methods for the response. The main responding method practiced is to first retell what we heard to a partner, then after practicing verbally, write about it using the "first, then, finally" frame. The frame is basically three sentences where students attempt to pick out the most important parts of the story in the order of what they heard and then write about it in their own words. Additions to this have been a 3 panel comic with captions, again using the "first, then finally" frame concept and things like diary writing as a character in the story. Even though the kids are really enjoying the story the reading response is not all that well liked for several and can be difficult for some to complete. Now that they all know how to do the different kinds of responding I let them choose in what way they'd like to complete their response and suddenly engagement went up, complaining went down and their work improved. Me thinks there is something to this choice stuff!

Math 8: Sticky Note Success

This post is courtesy of Middle School teacher Pam Rutten.

Monday morning always seems to be a struggle for my students to get motivated, especially in math. So I am really focusing on Monday mornings and how I can get them engaged right off the bat. This Monday I tried a little activity with Sticky Notes. We are working with fractions, decimals and percents. I wanted them to be able to convert a fraction into a decimal, or a decimal into a fraction, etc. and understand what the values actually meant. I split the class into 6 groups of 4 and gave each group sticky notes. I then wrote 14 different values in the board (.0067, 75%, 3/5, etc) and had them write one value on one sticky note. I then gave each group a section of blackboard and their task was to place their values in ascending order on the board. I made it a competition to see who could complete the task first. Those were the only instructions I gave them. In order for them to do this, they first had to recognize that it would be easiest to convert them all to the same type (either all fractions, all decimals, or all percents), and then order. So it was very interesting to watch. All the students were very engaged and discussing with their group about how to go about the task. A few of the groups converted all to percent and a few converted all to decimals and then ordered them. Once they thought they had it correct they would call me over and I would simply say "error" if there was one and they would all go crazy and try again. Once they had all figured it out I had each group pick a representative to share the approach their group took to solve the problem. Then to top it off, no group had converted to fractions, so I had another race to see which group could now convert all the values to fractions first. Overall, I would say it was very successful, and the students had a much clearer understanding than they did at the beginning of the class.

Tableaus-Social Studies 9

So I decided to try tableaus in class yesterday. It was a refreshing break from some fairly dry content material (life in New France). The students were really into it and were able to explain their tableaus well and include key issues and events.

I started off class today with questions about the material yesterday and most the class was able to answer them adequately. (Marcus Krieger)

Grade 8: Choice...and censorship

This post courtesy of Middle School teacher Lindsay Anderson.

For Remembrance Day, students were given an option for how to represent a veteran's story of their choosing:  poem, interview, illustration, letter, etc. One of my students did an amazing job on this assignment! He is really into Call-of-Duty video games (war based), and so first of all liked the idea of researching a real war veteran. He wanted to not only create a picture, but also write a poem! (He was only required to complete one option but decided to do an extra one as well). I wanted to blog about this particular assignment because in this assignment I saw how by allowing this student to make connections to something I didn't really "approve" of, he came up with something really meaningful. When this student was working on this assignment, he was chatting with his friends and making connections to his video game. A part of me wanted to shut the discussion down, but a part of me enjoyed seeing him get so excited about something that he is good at, and apply it to the assignment.  On a similar note, a few weeks ago students were given the option of creating Facebook pages on the protagonist in one of our stories,again, I was thinking, Is Facebook really appropriate? but the results that I got were excellent. Students loved using Facebook. They totally hit the learning outcome (showing conflict), and had fun.

Math 9: Rational Numbers

In Melissa Berrisford’s math 9 class, as an alternative to individual work, the students were put into groups of four for a game. Each student was given a piece of paper and asked to divide it into 8 sections (they could choose to fold the paper however they wanted). Then a problem was put on the overhead and every student wrote the problem down on their paper individually but they were all expected to collaborate in how they solved it. The whole group then had to agree on a final answer at which point one appointed student would raise their answer in the air and ask the teacher to check it. If the answer was correct the group would be allowed to advance to the next problem (the students worked through a total of 8 problems).

The whole thing is a competition (to see which group can successfully complete the 8 problems) and it engages students who like to compete but it also takes the risk away from less confident students as they are allowed to work through their answers with other students, and they don’t have to hold up their answers by themselves. This same game format could be used for various topics.