misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread
Many teachers like the standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving.
"Progressions Documents", the documents which outline specific mathematical learning progressions upon which the Common Core State Standards were based. If you're in a state that teaches these you should definitely find some time to read through them. If you are a teacher elsewhere, it can't hurt to understand these progressions.
This informational text piece lends itself to having students create an associative letter project versus a traditional report. In an associative letter project, students are assigned a letter that they must use to find words representing the text they’ve just read. For example, “R is for the Montgomery Bus Boycott” might lead a student to choose words like race, rights, or Rosa as the focus of a variety of paragraphs that describe the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
By providing students with meaningful, thought-provoking experiences, you can turn informational text study into an exercise in creative and critical thinking!
Informational text isn’t going to bring about the death of creativity; rather, creativity depends upon what we ask students to do with the text once they’ve read it. If we ask students to read a non-fiction passage then fill out a worksheet about the passage, we are missing a chance to provide our students with an opportunity to create imaginative, artistic end products demonstrating critical thinking skills hard at work.
Grades 6-8
Exemplar Informational Text: Freedom Walkers, the Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, by Russell Freedman
Creative Thinking Approach: Associative Letter Project
In Freedom Walkers,
This site is great! It includes objectives, math vocab, modeling problems, exercises, differentiated problems, student self-eval, writing component, and homework. Best of all it's FREE!
This is another great resource for parents on Common Core and how they can help their child in each grade. I like this one in particular because it shows parents a 3 year CCSS snap shot.
"Over 5,000 complete Common Core-aligned lessons from our 130 Master Teachers.
Introducing CC.BetterLesson - a brand new, free resource from the BetterLesson team featuring the highest quality Common Core-aligned lessons created through our Master Teacher Project."