Grading
Grades are the way your student's understanding is communicated home. They do not represent a child's work ethic, organizational ability, or effort, but rather his or her demonstration of a specific skill or set of skills.
Assessing Work: Because my teaching schedule doesn't change much week over week, the kids figure out a routine pretty quickly. Likewise, the types of writing we do are clearly established so it doesn't take long for them to figure out expectations. In the rough draft stage, I'm more about content -- get your ideas out there. It's not until final drafts that grammar/spelling/ punctuation get into the mix as long as they haven't prevented us from understanding the content. I'm a big believer in the "if it's not right, let's make it right" philosophy. As a result, my gradebook is often VERY fluid. In fact, your student will do a LOT of work that never even receives a grade (some of that is recorded that way so that you can see your student's progress). I use that type of writing to gauge current ability levels before moving forward in a lesson or to help prepare the kids for an upcoming discussion or other assignment.
Essentially, student work is assessed to fit in one of these four categories:
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The Standards: I grade based on the Common Core. I know there's been a lot of commentary about the Core, but honestly, I was teaching before it existed -- English Language Arts standards have pretty much stayed the same. You can find the Common Core here. In Language Arts, I focus on the Writing, Language, and Speaking and Listening Standards. To a lesser degree, sometimes the Literacy standards come into play. In Literacy I focus on both Informational Text and Literature. Language Arts standards pop up in here as well.
What Assignments Are Worth: Every assignment in my gradebook appears to be worth 100 points. That's mostly so that it is transparent to you and your student. In reality, I use a "multiplier" to weight individual assignments. For instance, a 5-minute assessment on nouns might be 100 points, but its multiplier is only .25. A large writing assignment is also worth 100 points, but it uses 1 as its multiplier. As a result, you can see how your student did (out of the traditional 100 points we're all used to), but in grade calculation that noun assessment just doesn't count for as much as the essay. Typically the more time we spend on an assignment, the larger the multiplier.
What Do the Grades Mean?
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