Group items tagged

Site that provide Common Core-aligned performance tasks

"At some schools, up to 70 percent of kids are refusing to take the exams". "Thousands of students are opting out of new standardized tests aligned to the Common Core standards, defying the latest attempt by states to improve academic performance".

This study focuses on the stages of literacy development in Kindergarten up to 8th graders. The author states how children's minds do not learn by taking mental pictures or by memorizing but by constructing mental images over time. It also includes resources to engage students in word study at various levels.

This resource explains how children from grades K-8 develop their knowledge of words/vocabulary. It explains how teachers can instruct in a way that meets each learner's needs by expanding from what they already know, adding new content, but not too much where the teacher frustrates the learner. This resource helps with my groups SMART Target Learning goals because it meets everyone's grade level (K-8), and focuses on reading skills.

This is a website that lets teacher find lesson plans that link math and the real world. Some lesson plans are free and others you need to pay for. This is great for high school teachers because the lessons have a heavy econ focus and most students like learning about and working with money.

This website contains a wide variety of virtual manipulative that can be maneuvered by all learners at all stages. Both students and teachers can use this to demonstrate understanding as well as modeling a strategy. All viewers are able to see concrete place values as well as the composition and decomposition of hundred and ten blocks. It is a great tool for the visual learner and those who are still in the concrete stage in addition/subtraction.

This article describes how teachers use different forms of technology in the classroom to foster students' learning in the area of mathematics. In order to be considered an effective teaching tool, the article explains that instructors need to think about cognitive and mathematical fidelity when determining what computer programs to use in the classroom.

This article is about alphabet knowledge in Pre-kindergarten and Kindergarten classroom. It went over different assessments to use to assess the proper way to demonstrate alphabet knowledge. This a great article to read. It talks about instructional approaches and how to shift to alphabet instruction that aligned with emphasis on assessments and differentiated instruction. I believe that would be good resources to help teach my students' letter sounds. This might also help me achieve my SMART target goal.

SMART Goal: Given 1 month of guided reading instruction, students in below grade-level reading groups will increase their reading level by at least one level. This article explains how implementing consistent guided reading in the classroom can improve reading levels. This directly relates to my SMART Goal because it gives suggestions on how to organize and implement the difficult task of guided reading groups.

This site contains free resources for science teachers. Teachers can search to find resources by keyword, such as topic or class. Our group can use this to find lesson plans or activities to support our SMART goal of supplementing instruction for some AP Biology students.

This is a great source that provides the similar manipulatives that we use in math- digi blocks, fraction patterns, base tens blocks. Students can manipulate the resources online. In the homepage, you'll see that the manipulatives are organized by grade level and math topic.

This article provides both in classroom as well as online teacher resources to incorporate when teaching word problems to upper elementary aged students. It provides easy to implement strategies and an overview of why they are important.

This research shows that students with special learning needs are more successful when they receive extra teacher support.

Teachers incorporate writing in math class to help students reflect on their learning, deepen their understanding of important concepts by explaining and providing examples of those concepts, and make important connections to real-life applications of the math they are learning. This page includes links to other writing resources.

I found these writing strategies to be extremely useful in helping come up with activities for helping students improve their writing skills.

At the New Mexico School for the Arts, they tried a variety of approaches for using data to improve student achievement, and didn't get it right at first. This article shares what they learned.

This article includes example-based insights and techniques for using student performance data when talking to parents about their children.

This article discusses the effects of learning targets on all people in the school - students, teachers, principals and central-office administrators. It goes on to describe ways to create an effective learning target and the actions necessary order to do so. Furthermore, it outlines the process of learning targets. Effective learning targets are able to help close the achievement gap!

Personal Finance is life skill that students will use from childhood into adulthood.

This online language learning platform uses gamification to motivate students and make language learning fun. It provides an individualized learning path (differentiation) to increase language proficiency. I have used Duolingo for my own language practice, for teaching my children languages, and in my classroom as a part of language instruction.

This is not an article but a diagram that shows how learning gaps in lower grades continue and get more pronounced as a student moves on. I felt that this was important to me because I teach 1st grade. As teachers we need to lessen the learning gaps early.