The Partnership for Assessment for Readiness for College and Career (PARCC) has released a draft of Performance Level Descriptor (PLD) for each grade. Public comment is open until May 16. I’ve linked to a few documents here that should be of particular concern; see the website for full documentation. English Language Arts Performance Level Descriptors [...]
May 6, 2013
Common Core Tests: Students with Disabilities and English Language Learners
The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) has released a draft of its PARCC Accommodations Manual, “a comprehensive policy document that will support local educators in the selection, administration and evaluation of accommodations for the assessment of students with disabilities and English learners on the PARCC End-of-Year, Performance-Based and optional Mid-Year [...]
April 29, 2013
Kids’ 100 Most Popular Books
What are kids reading today? Let’s find out. The Common Core is in the process of setting up a PII-P20 database to monitor everything that we do in education. PII is data that includes Personally Identifiable Information; P20 refers to a database that monitors students from preschool through college and into the workforce. The purpose [...]
April 15, 2013
The One-Hour Narrative: CCSS Writing Lesson Plan
My friend, Rich Davis, is an extraordinary illustrator who has created the Pick and Draw (PAD) card game to encourage kids to draw with more creativity. It’s such a simple card game that it has been adapted to many activities. My favorite activity is using it to help kids create a character that they care [...]
April 9, 2013
Fact or Opinion: A CCSS ELA Lesson Plan
Facts. They are important. They are the basis of our educational system, the foundation of science and industry, and a clear emphasis in the Common Core State Standards. In both reading and writing, students will be expected to use fact based evidence of their comprehension and compositions. Yet our students are not always clear on [...]
April 4, 2013
Setting: When Where Matters–A CCSS Lesson Plan
When we ask students to analyze literature we often concentrate on the plot, character development, or sequence of events because they are critical to understanding the meaning of the story. But sometimes the setting of the book can be just as important as the characters. The setting can actually drive the plot of the story. [...]
March 18, 2013
Fake Website: Teach Students to Assess Websites
by Stephanie Bearce Years ago if a child asked a teacher the meaning of a word, the teacher’s automatic answer was “Look it up in the dictionary.” Now the temptation is to say “Google it.” The internet is here to stay and with it comes a plethora of information sites, access to online magazines, eBooks, [...]
March 8, 2013
Literary Non-fiction
The CCSS calls for students to engage in reading literary non-fiction text. At first glance that seems to be an oxymoron. Literary non-fiction? That’s not in the Dewey Decimal system. But it is in your library and your librarian knows which books fit this category. They are the non-fiction books that readers drool over. True [...]
February 27, 2013
Paired Books: One Way Street
The CCSS requires 4th graders to read 50% fiction and 50% nonfiction. This means that over the course of the year, and across all subject areas, it should be a 50-50 split. However, some educators are trying what they are calling Paired Reading. In this strategy, if you read a fiction book, you must read [...]
February 14, 2013
High School Essay Contests
It is well understood that writing improves when students are given real writing tasks. That is, a real audience makes writers work harder to achieve real communication. That’s why writing contests can work well for high school writers. Here are two to consider: Win a Whale Camp Now in its second year, The Ocean Awareness [...]
