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SMART Goal: By the end of marking period 3, 80% or higher of students will score a 90% or higher on a representing numbers assessment. This website is offers fun and engaging games to support math development of students grades pre-kindergarten through high school. When selecting a grade level, teachers can view a large list of skills associated with Common Core. Skills are categorized, making it easy for educators to look for desired math practice. In regard to the SMART goal posted above the teacher could select from the series of skills related to representing numbers such as: Counting tens and ones - up to 20, County on ten frames - up to 40, and Counting by tens - up to 100. Students will be motivated by this resource as it is colorful and interactive. A benefit to using this site is that when students are unable to answer a correctly, they are provided with an explanation of how to correctly apply the skill.

This article details an instructional model called Interactive Learning (IL), which contains ten best practices for educators to follow that must be implemented in all lessons. Using these practices can help student achievement tremendously, as evidenced by the example school, which doubled student achievement in three years using these practices.

This is a informative article about 10 strategies for engaging underperforming students. Since my SMART goal is all about giving additional resources for success to my lowest performing students (students who previously took Biology I) this fits perfectly. This will help me create a plan to reach out and engage each student and write up resources for each of them.

I think these ideas have come a long way and are being implemented in many classrooms. This seems like a norm for my school or even my classroom. Although, I say that and I think it is hard to incorporate all components every day. Especially when I think of student movement. I think this is an excellent article to pinpoint instructional strategies.

Grades K-2 Reading. Kindergarten-K, First-1st Grade and Second-2nd Grade Smartboard Interactive Reading. ELA Writing Games, Activities and Lessons. Teachers and students can use these Smartboard games, activities and lessons to learn about Reading ELA in Kindergarten, First Grade and Second Grade. This site offers an array of phonics activities to support struggling K-2 students working on initial letter sounds, vowel sounds, and reading skills.

This article makes a very good argument for incorporating e-mail into the classroom to improve student writing. The author explains how students are often bored with traditional writing assignments and editing/revising sessions using Microsoft Word (even though this is technology, it is less interactive). The author explains how having a second party on the other end of the email who will be reading their work encourages students to carefully proofread and make edits/revisions as necessary on their own before sending the e-mails. Students were also more interesting in the authentic writing tasks that e-mail communication allowed (such as writing to professionals in their fields of study/interest and receiving real responses). The author gives a plethora of ideas for utilizing e-mail to improve student writing in various content classes, including Language Arts, Math, Foreign Language, and Social Studies. Kristine and I found this article and are hoping to work in this strategy/component into our Data Action Plan (although we previously did not list it as a strategy to help with our SMART goals). WEEK 7

This website offers fun, interactive, online games for students to play over the summer to assist in closing their learning gap. This would be a great resource for teachers to give to their students at the end of the school year, or even over long breaks, for them to practice skills they are lacking.

The main takeaway from this resource for me was where the onus falls for the learning gap. Unlike the instruction gap, the learning gap seems more focused on the student needing to bring up their learning to ensure that they maintain over the summer, or reach new levels. The common denominator is that these all seem to take place outside of the classroom. However, I could see a teacher recommend these resources to different groups or having centers set up to ensure that students are working in areas that they need to improve to close their learning gaps during class time.

Resources and exposure to programs like this are imperative for underprivileged students who's family's do not have an understanding of how to maintain and increase their child's educational progress during the summer.