Have you ever struggled with helping students write a good conclusion? This is a simple and powerful activity I designed to help students understand the difference. Download the pdf of the strategy, which includes directions, a template, and an answer sheet for this activity. I designed this for the elementary level, but this is easily […]
Setting Achievement Bars
With the end of the school year comes time for district and school staff to determine how well students have learned. School Boards do this also. If you want to measure student achievement at higher levels, one way is to look at how your state sets its achievement bar on the state tests your students […]
MEAP Constructed Response Reading
I designed this handout to provide some ideas related to the Reading constructed response items for the Fall 2009 MEAP test. In this short piece, I share the item descriptors for the reading constructed response items in grades 3 through 8, examples of the kinds of questions we can ask students when they read, a […]
MEAP Constructed Response – Examples of Scoring Guides
Examples of Prompts for Reading Constructed Response Download this document to get a feel for what the constructed response prompts and scoring tools look like. In the booklet you’ll find four examples of passages, examples of prompts for the passages, and examples of scoring tools that go with the prompts. These are good to help […]
Fix That Graph – Sources of Revenue
Here’s the scenario. A local school district has just released its proposed budget for the upcoming two-year period. Within the 157 page budget document are two pie charts – one for revenues and one for expenditures. The graphic on the left is the actual pie chart for revenues. Take a look at the graph and […]
Compare and Contrast – Roles of Government
Here is a lesson that supports the learning of comparing responsibilities between state and federal governments. I’ve included a couple of things here: A lesson in which students use manipulatives and a Venn Diagram planner to compare and contrast the responsibilities between the roles of the federal and state governments. Additionally, a beginning list of […]
MEAP Item Descriptors
The MEAP Item Descriptors Books have just been released by staff at the Michigan Department of Education. Stay in the know and download the booklets so you can use them for curriculum alignment purposes. I’ve also written a few tips about how to use these booklets. Just download my pdf and see if there’s an idea […]