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How Students Create Their Own Learning Assessments

How Students Create Their Own Learning Assessments

This post is last of a series based on excepts from my book on Student-Engaged Assessment: Strategies to Empower All Learners by Laura Greenstein and Mary Ann Burke (2020). You can purchase the book from Roman and Littlefield for charts, examples, and worksheets on how to engage students to become owners of their learning successes. [Read more…]

Guiding Our Kids’ Decision Making Independence

Guiding Our Kids’ Decision Making Independence

As children gain the social and emotional skills to manage their daily responsibilities, they slowly learn how to become more independent in their decision-making skills at home and at school. Initially, they learn how to play responsibly in their home and in their backyard. They will eventually learn how to play in their front yard. Depending on traffic and the location of their neighborhood, primary grade students must learn how to cross busy streets to visit friends and travel to school. Independent decision making skills with predetermined consequences expand as children enter middle school and start socializing with their friends at public places while taking public transportation.

The path to becoming independent is slow and continuous. During children’s early years in school, parents can help their children identify how they can complete their daily responsibilities. Some parents and teachers create an expanded list of activities that must be completed daily. This “star chart” can help each child identify specific responsibilities that must be completed daily. The list can include how each child will manage their personal care, household chores, and school homework and preparations. [Read more…]

How to Parent Today’s Kids for Success

How to Parent Today’s  Kids for Success 

Parents become anxious when considering the negative effects of becoming a tiger mama or a helicopter parent with their children during these Covid pandemic times. Although they strive to protect their children from harm, parents also want to ensure that their children are successful in today’s world. For example, dozens of parents purchased their children’s acceptances into competitive colleges by sending funds to a fraudulent checking account managed by a corrupt college counselor. The counselor used these funds to bribe college sports coaches to accept unqualified students on a college team and paid corrupt test proctors to change students’ standardized testing results. Some prospective college students may have signed their college admissions packets without understanding the implications of their parents’ actions. Others believed that their parents were being morally responsible when helping them falsify their college application documentation. [Read more…]

Let’s Talk Math Strategies

 

Let’s Talk Math Strategies

My second-grade students are asked to fluently add and subtract within 100 when using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction per CCSS 2 NBT.5. Was that a mouthful? It’s a lot of words to explain how one can use different place value strategies when adding and subtracting two-and-three-digit numbers. This approach is a big departure from the kind of math I was taught when I was my students’ age.

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How to Help Our Children Enjoy Reading at Home

How to Help Our Children Enjoy Reading at Home

When our children are small, they are eager learners and love to hear us read stories at bedtime.  Many will fight with us to read just one more story. When our children start elementary school, they will learn to read. Some will struggle with learning vowels sounds, memorizing sight words, summarizing what they just read, or applying new concepts to the story. When working with primary grade students, here are some tips on how to make learning fun when practicing reading with your children at home:

  • Continue to read with your children each night and take turns reading to each other.
  • Let your children select the book that you will read. Many children want to read beyond their reading ability or below their reading ability. Let them enjoy that opportunity after they practice reading their assigned book.
  • Make reading fun by incorporating an art project. Some children like to act out the stories and they cut out characters and act out the story while you both take turns reading.
  • Some children love to illustrate the story and write summary sentences about what they read under the story.
  • Other children prefer to rewrite the story and create their own unique ending.
  • Get a journal for your reader and let them create new chapters or stories about their favorite characters.
  • Children love to create songs and write poems based on a story.
  • Reinforce learning skills by having the children sound out the words and use relaxation skills when they become frustrated. Some children prefer memorizing words instead of sounding them out.

[Read more…]