PBS Teachers is an awesome website for teachers. It is not like other websites teachers use. PBS Teachers gives teachers resources that they can really use in their classrooms. The website PBS Teachers is a place where teachers from around the country can go to find lesson plans, collaborate with other teachers, or even learn new ideas and material to enhance their classroom. One of the greatest resources on their website in their lesson plans. Every teacher needs lesson plans and sometimes they will struggle to come up with an engaging and fun lesson plan. Sometimes teacher will just search for lesson plans on any website but by going to PBS Teachers you know you will be getting concrete and interactive lessons. Lesson plans are one of the most important pieces of teaching. Without good lessons teachers do not have anything to go off of and will not teach the students what they need to know. Another great part of the PBS Teachers website is the discussions you can have with other teachers. Teachers still need to learn new things and the only way they will is by talking to other teachers. All teachers can learn from each other. On PBS Teachers they have a teacher discussion area. This is where teachers can share and comment ideas, questions and thoughts. This is just like a blog for only teachers! It is a safe place for teachers to talk to one another and help from across the country.
The last part of PBS Teachers that is so great is all the links to other helpful websites! There are great websites out there but sometimes finding them can be hard. PBS Teachers makes it easy to find and use other great sites. On their website they have links to PBS Kids and PBS Parents. These are both such helpful links for teachers to use for students or to suggest to parents!
PBS Teachers is a resourceful site for all teachers from Pre-K to 12th grade. It is a place to go for ideas, help, and lessons, and the best part about it is that it is free!!
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The students will read the comic and learn about a firefighter and how they help in the community. There are many community helpers who help and do other things in the community. After the students read the comic they will make their own! The students will use the comic space given to make their own comic. They will choose a community helper and create a story about that community helper.
Formative assessment can be challenging especially for the younger grades. Kindergarten is usually the first time kids are in school and they need to be assessed appropriately. The teacher cannot expect the students to come to school reading and writing, while some might be able to, most students cannot. The teacher should assess the students right away on what they know and teach students all year to reach a goal and then be assessed again to see if they reached that goal.
There are so many ways to assess students in the classroom. There is no one way to assess students. There are so many great tools to help teachers assess their students. With upper grades the teacher can give their students more tools to assess them with, but with kindergarten there are not as many tools. There are still some great ways to use formative assessment in the classroom.
In my research I found a school's plan for assessing kindergarteners. It is a 78 page packet that explains what assessing, evaluating, and reporting student's work. The school has laid out what they expect the teachers to do to get the most valuable information about the student's learning. This is the whole idea of formative assessment. It is the way teachers find out how much the students learned from a lesson.
Formative assessments are done everyday in school. Standardized tests are a big assessment that most people think of when they think of assessing students but they are not given in kindergarten. Teachers need to have something to assess the students on. There are two things that help teachers know what to assess students are. The first is the national standards for kindergarten and then the state standards. In North Carolina they use the North Carolina Standard Course of Study. All teachers in North Carolina need to follow these standards and make sure their students learn what they need to.
There are many important tools for formative assessment. Such tools can be observation, interaction, and listening. These are all tools that the teacher and the student can use to get the most out of formative assessment. The teacher can observe the student and take notes about their progress. The teacher and student can interact with each other which gives the teacher a better idea of how the student is doing, and also how the student thinks they are doing. It is important for the student to be a part of their own learning. And last is listening. The teacher should be listening to the student and really understanding what they are thinking and why they are thinking that.
Formative assessment is very important in all grades, and can be made into more student and teacher friendly activities other than standardized tests!
