Report Card Season

Whew. With each report card time, I've gotten a little better at keeping up with grading. This time is no exception. Better than the past few times, but still, I'm pretty behind.

As I was looking over my gradebook, I realized that I had section or two that I didn't have many grades for.

I've mentioned before how my report cards require me to assess how kids are doing in lots of individual areas, and for the most part, it's been easy to assess each category for reading, language, and writing.

In writing, I have a rubric that gives kids a score in each 'area.' In reading and language, I incorporate a lot of our review into centers, so it's easy to take that Noun-Verb-Adjective Sort and plug it in as a Parts of Speech grade.

So, this weekend, as I was lamenting my lack of significant grades in a few of the specific math categories. I thought to myself that there has to be a better way to do give a review assessment that specifically fits the categories I have to grade on.

Despite the fact that grade cards need to go home Wednesday, I decided to start typing up a Giant Math Assessment specifically fit to my grade card categories.

Our categories include:

• Counts, Reads, and Writes Numbers Well
• Knows Basic Addition Facts
• Knows Basic Subtraction Facts
• Computes Accurately
• Reasons Well in Problem Solving
• Uses Math Symbols Correctly
• Understands Concepts Of:

1. Place Value
2. Addition (carrying) Yes, I know that it's really better to call it 'regrouping,' but this is what's on the grade card!
3. Subtraction (borrowing) Same story here!
4. Time
5. Money
6. Graphing
7. Geometry
8. Measurement
9. Fractions

Yup. I need to give an overall grade in math and a mark for progress/ effort in each one of those categories. And that's just math.

Last year, my school had a standards calendar and 4 question assessments for each standard. At the end of the 3 weeks we covered the standard, we filled in a color-coded spreadsheet based on how they did out of 4, and met with our principal to assess how we (and our students) were doing. I think that's part of why I feel like I don't have enough specific data!

So... I'm debating whether or not to actually give them the Giant Quarter Math Assessment of Doom this time, just because it's a looong test for them to take (which I would prefer to spread out over a few days) and will take me a loooong time to grade them (and, let's face it, I have other things I also need to grade over the next two days!).

 

It may not happen this time, but for the 4th quarter, I am all set to review more and better, using my Magic Number page (free!) and the terrific Weekly Math Magic from Sunny Days in Second Grade. She's offered a few samples for free on her blog, so if you haven't checked it out yet, you definitely should!

And then, after all that awesome review, I can give them the Giant Assessment (spread out over multiple days) to make my final grade cards that much easier. (And maybe to have a comprehensive assessment of math skills to pass on to their 3rd grade teachers!)

Any interest in checking it out? If you could use some or all of this, feel free. It's not cute, but it's functional (I hope!) and it's 7 pages long.

P.S.- It doesn't have measurement right now, because we really haven't covered it much at all yet, but all of those other categories are covered in as much detail as I expect my students to know it at this point, based on what we have covered so far.

Please comment if you take it, and let me know how it works for your class! (Checking comments is great report card procrastination!)