Snow Day Plans

This winter may be the worst that most of us can remember. Lots of lesson plans have had to be rewritten and rewritten again. The real question is what continuity problems are being created for our students, and what can we do about it? There is no one great solution, but hopefully, this entry might give you something to think about and to come up with even better ideas.

The first and easiest solution is to create a series of "No School Day Assignments". Let your kids know that they will be expected to work on these when there is no school. Include lessons in Skills Tutor that cover the concepts that you are covering in class. It might be best NOT to use the pretests. The pretests might not have your kids do the lessons that you are covering that week. Instead, you might choose the lessons that directly correspond with your week's planned concepts and skills. Take a survey in your class to find out who has a computer with internet access at home. This will give you an idea of how many of your students you can expect to complete the lessons.

You might also want to make up a "Snow Day Packet" of activities and work sheets that you can print out from Assessment Center's Skills Resources and Skills Tutor's worksheets. If you include lessons that you know always trip up your students, they can do extra work on those concepts and skills while they are at home. You might want to send these home in a sealed envelope with something like, "Open in the event of a snow day only!" on the front. Try to include a writing activity in this packet as well as just worksheets. The Parent Activities from Skill Resources would be a good idea to help those supervising the students on those days.

The benchmark assessments could also be given on these days. If you know that the forecast for the next day is for bad weather, you could send home the test code with the students. For those of you with websites, you could let the students know that the test codes will be posted on your website. If you have an email list for your students, you could email them instructions of what to do and include the test code in this email. If you know that some of your students do not have internet at home, you might want to print up the tests for them at the beginning of the winter months and send them home with them when it appears that the weather will make school cancellation the following day a possibility. Remember to enter these scores later for these students.

If you are having late starts, you are really losing instructional time. This would be a good opportunity to duplicate the benchmark assessments and send them home as homework. Having the students enter their scores individually when they next have computer time will take very little time, or you can enter them yourself very easily.

If you have already given the benchmark for the month, you might want to prepare an activity to help them with the most critical need reflected in the reports on that assessment. You might want to have them find the correct answers in the passage, or you might create an activity to help them make discoveries about main idea, inference, or any other skill tested in that passage.

These ideas are just starting points, but they may help you make a decision about using Skills Iowa to keep the momentum going in your classes in this incredible winter.

Remember, winter can't last forever, but it surely can seem like it will. Keep your spirits up and try to make the most of every day!

Using Skills Iowa's Reports

If you are giving Assessment Center assessments, you should be checking reports.

It's in the reports that you will find the areas in which your students are succeeding and in which they are struggling. Of course, we want to celebrate the successes, and we want to address the areas that cause our students difficulties.

In his address at the Iowa Association of School Boards, Mike Schmoker pointed out an example of a teacher in Flagstaff, AZ who raised student achievement in his building by having his students do three simple things over and over again: read, discuss and write.

We suggest that you print off the reading comprehension assessments you are giving. After consulting the reports to find the critical needs from this assessment, pass the assessment out to your students and use it again. One way to use it is to have your kids read the passage again and then search the passage for the correct answers. They can do this in teams or individually.

Another activity you might try is to break your class down into teams of twos and have them read the passage with a task in mind. For instance, if you see that your students are having difficulty picking out the main idea, you might have your students take the passage apart paragraph by paragraph writing one sentence that contains the idea that is expressed by that paragraph. If they are having trouble making inferences they could choose all of the events that lead up to a conclusion and all of the events that followed the conclusion and writing a paragraph that explains why things ended the way they did. You get the idea. There is no one way to use the passages in conjunction with the reports, but the key is that you use the reports to point you to a way to read, discuss and write.

Your project leader will be happy to come to your school to help you work with the reports, but the key is to look at them and make decisions on what help your students need. Just knowing that they are struggling with inference or main idea will not help your students. Just assessing your students on these concepts will not help either. Checking reports and planning your instruction around them will have an effect on achievement.