I’ve been working on collecting ideas for content-area literacy. I began with the reading standards for science, grades 9-10 from the Common Core State Standards. Download a pdf version of the 28-page document and see if there’s an idea or two you can use. Informational Literacy Standards for Science – FRESH LINK, Updated September 27, …
Common Core Standards for Literacy in Science (Reading, 9-10) Read More »
Motor Mouth is simply an engaging strategy for students to review important vocabulary. This can be used in any class at any grade level. Did I mention that this is also fun? I’ve included the PowerPoint with directions and a template that is ready to modify for your own use. Click here for the Powerpoint!
Writing is a tool for thinking and learning. It doesn’t matter what content area you teach, you’ll find many opportunities to help students think through writing. This quick overview gives a couple of ideas for having students write about data from a line graph. Download the overview sheet and examples of having elementary students write …
In this pdf, I’ve included examples of analysis questions for two different line graphs. Both of these are for the elementary level. For each set of questions, I’ve also included a large size of the graph that you can project and/or give students as they work to answer these questions. Download the pdf of the …
One of the simplest things you can do to help students think deeply about visual material is to write analysis questions for the different types of visuals you use with students. This example is for bar graphs – and I’ve included two examples to give you an idea of how these questions might look. (I’ll …
This is a response technique to give students practice in answering recall and some critical thinking types of questions. Rapid Response Cards are any type of response cards you use with your students. They are called Rapid Response Cards because they are a quick way to obtain responses from all of the students in your …
Rapid Response Cards – Checking for Understanding Read More »
This content card is designed for elementary school students. If you like this one, just let me know and I’ll add to the content for middle and high school students. Download the bar graph content card in pdf format.
If you write paper-and-pencil assessments, you’re going to love these sheets that I call Stem Starters. Stem Starters are ideas of ways to write item stems for test items. Think of these as handy reference sheets for those times when you are writing item stems – the question part of a test item. I’ve designed Stem …
I’ve been working with a few different ways to unpack standards so that they are easily accessbile to teachers. This is a grade-four standard for measurement. Actually, this is PART of the standard for measurement. For this part of the “test”, I’ve focused on just the measurement of length in U.S. customary units. (The part …
If you’ve ever worked with me, you know the importance I place on the content that students learn. Of course we want students to think deeply, but we want them to think deeply about something – the content we want them to learn. Here’s another example of a content card – this one for fourth-grade …