The week’s reflection is a few days late but better to reflect later than not at all 🙂  Our prompt was the following:
- What do you do as a teacher that feels unique to you and your class?
- Share one of your unique lesson plans or activities.
- Share one of your unique forms of assessment.
I think the most unique thing to my class is the classroom economy. Â I’ve spoken about at it length in my blog but what I’m most excited about is that this year, not only am I introducing budgeting and giving to charity, I’m also documenting the process of setting it up in a video series aptly titled ‘How To Set Up A Classroom Economy.’Â I’ll put the playlist below which includes videos on what I set up before school starts, what the first weeks look like, how to roll out the budget, and even partnering with parents in helping kids give their class money to charity (which we did this past week; it’s video 11 in the playlist.
As far as a unique lesson plan, I think my Cheez-It lesson plan for teaching perfect squares is always a lot of fun and seems to get the point across that square roots are just the side of a square. Â Not super unique since I stole it from another math blog, but still fun.
Regarding unique forms of assessment, I don’t really have much there.  I do have them do a math reflection blog where they give themselves a self-assessment based on a rubric.  Nothing groundbreaking there.  I do like the idea a colleague of mine shared earlier this year where he has an ‘A’ page on his test.  It’s the last page of the test with one or two problems that may extend just a tad beyond what was learned in class.  If you get everything right up to that point, you can still get a 90.  To get a 100, you have to also get those right (or at least get on the right track).  I’ve done that in my robotics classes with my rubrics this year where the highest level is ‘exceeds expectations’ which students need to go above and beyond to attain.  If they ‘meet expectations’ on the rubric for everything, they can still get a 90%.  I haven’t done that really in my math classes yet though.  Perhaps next test.
This reflection was a bit of a filler blog; nothing really new reflected here but mainly because I feel I’ve written about most of this stuff already and not a ton comes to mind when I think about success and struggles last week.  I’ll make more of an effort at the end of this week for my own sake.  Thanks for reading 🙂
