Standards Based Grading and a Freebie

This year our district decided to move to Standards Based Grading (SBG). For those of you unfamiliar with SBG, this means our students are no longer given grades, but their academic performance is based on their mastery towards a standard. Student's assessments, performance tasks and other activities are marked as either below standard, working towards the standard, meeting most of the standard or mastery. At each grade level, our teachers are able to speak specifically to a student's academic abilities.

For each of the types of student work, teachers look at between 1-3 standards for each of these tasks. This means we are looking at each unit and each assignment within the unit and asking ourselves, "what is our purpose for this assignment?". Our kindergarten through third grade teachers are realizing that they have essentially been doing a version of SBG, but are now having to tie everything they want to assess to a standard and record it in an electronic grade book...this is the tough part for them. Our fourth and fifth grade teachers who have used an electronic grade book forever, are struggling more with the idea of not giving a letter grade. There is a lot to SBG. I will keep updating you on our progress as we go; we are just starting to wrap our heads around the whole concept now.

So the freebie below comes from working with our kindergarten teachers as they began looking at tying an assessment to two of the Counting and Cardinality standards they have been practicing. Enjoy your copy of Design A Monster by clicking on the picture below. Students roll a die, count the dots (many are subitizing...they love using the word!) and then record the number next to the eyes, nose, mouth,etc. The teachers have also turned this into a center by leaving dice, a monster outline and some playdough nearby.The munchkins use the playdough to form the eyes, nose, mouths, etc.

Enjoy the rest of your week!