Teaching All Reading and Language Standards by Unit 4

There's a lot in this post, so before you read, please know that all of these materials are free, and available in my TpT store, and my new store in Teacher's Notebook.  I spent a lot of time on them, so I hope others find them useful.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, after charting out the assessed standards on both the weekly assessments and selection tests, only 7 of the 19 RL and RI standards are assessed through their questions.  That's not my evaluation of their questions, but their own labeling.  Likewise, they only assess on the L4 and L5 standards.  And I'm still not sure why they keep throwing in some 3rd grade standards on these assessments???

So, as I've done before, I will again be writing my own questions to go with the weekly stories.  But first I needed to layout a plan for coverage.  I started by looking at which standards they clearly aligned with each unit, and then took the remaining standards, and added them where they best fit.  When Kelley and I met last week, we put the finishing touches on this, and also did this with the language standards.


The idea of covering all of these in the first 4 units is because of testing:(  With the Smart Start, and the natural slow start anyways at the beginning of the year, I don't expect to get much farther than Unit 1 before the end of the first quarter.  The second quarter is always chopped up with conferences, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc.  So I also would like to spread out Unit 2.  Since this unit has the Poetry, Drama, Prose standard, there are a lot of fun activities that could be done instead of a story on the shorter weeks.  Unit 3 will likely start after Christmas (technically still our 2nd quarter for a couple of weeks) and then Unit 4 should go uninterrupted (if we don't have a winter like last year) and finish before the end of the 3rd quarter.  Then, it's a great time to review all standards with the remaining stories in Units 5 and 6, and prepare the students for State testing.  This year begins our switch to PARCC.

Additional materials I've created to align to this plan are student assessment pages, Unit cover pages with more detailed standard language, pages to keep track of resources, and student "I Can" posters to hang.

The student assessment page is similar to the format I used last year to help keep track of data for our standards-based grade card.  Only last year was one page with ALL reading and language standards.  It was too much, and I needed new ones every quarter.  This is the front (there is a back) and it is one page for each students for the entire year.  This way I can chart student progress on one sheet.  Each unit has the standards assessed that unit in the top, white portion, and the already taught standards in the smaller gray, bottom portion.  This is just a place to track issues when a student misses a question on a reviewed standard.  It certainly is more work to keep grades this way, but it is nice when you need to discuss student progress in a meeting, or just for yourself, all in one place!

The pages above are for my personal use.  I intend to put the left page in the front see-through pocket of my binder for reference, and the other page inside.  There's nothing worse than finishing a lesson, and then remembering that great resource you have that would have been perfect!  This will hopefully help remind me of those resources before I teach the lesson.  Below are the posters.  Last year we created very nice "I Can" posters for each unit, and hung them as we went.  Obviously we needed to redo this, but it's okay because the second time is always better.  This time, we will have a poster that has the standards that we will assess on ALL units, one for each Unit, and then we made a 6th poster for language.  The language doesn't have all standards, but those they should be thinking about in their daily writing.  These can be hung in the small 8.5 x 11 version, but I'd like to find another great deal on Vistaprint to order these as large posters like our last ones.