First Day of School Procedures: Organizing School Supplies

I originally posted this in 2015 and I'm reposting it because I dealing with school supplies is my second favorite part of the first day of school (after meeting the students). I know longer get to do it in my role as instructional coach but I still love school supplies. 

Students come on the first day and we deal with supplies. If a student bought everything on our school supply list, it would fill several grocery bags. Some are class supplies and need to be taken up in an organized way.

Our students share 3 teachers all day long and stay with their homeroom. My team and I discuss before hand what we need for our classes. And then we each decide what to do with the rest. My first year teaching, I do not remember what I did. I do remember that it was a mess. I went back and looked at my teaching journal and from my first day of teaching I have this sketch.

I wished someone had talked to me about collecting supplies on the first day, because I struggle with organization. (Have you seen the title of my blog?) After that first day, I realized I needed to do better and I have picked them up like this every since. I put baskets/boxes/tubs around the room on the first day of school with labels. After introductions, names, a quick overview of the day, we dig into supplies. I go down the list of supplies and ask students to get out one or two supplies at a time. If we are going to keep it in the classroom, I dismiss a few groups at a time to take it to the right spot. If they are going to keep it, I suggest a good way to store it, keep it, set it up, etc. I also give groups a Sharpie to write their names when necessary.

Then at the end of the day, I can go through all the baskets, and put the supplies away.

If the supply list calls for multiples of the same things, I have the students keep one and I take the other and store it in large plastic bags with their name on it. From experience, I have seen them lose the extra supplies before they have a chance to use them. Since these supplies are meant to least ALL year, I try to make that happen.

Since school supplies are my favorite, I love seeing so many brand new school supplies all at once! It is one of my favorite parts of the first day of school, especially since it is more organized then the first time.

10 Grading Tips for Teachers--How to Keep Grading Manageable and Fair

When I was younger, I loved grading papers. It was one of the things I was looking forward to when I become a teacher. I would have one of those sliding grading things and some cool pens and grading would be so fun!

That got old real quick. I like going through student work to get an idea of what they understand and where to take my instruction based on that data.

However, the process of collecting work, grading it, entering grades, passing back assignments...not something I enjoy.

Over the years, I improved my grading process so that it didn't consume so much of my time but still provided students with feedback that needed.

Here are my tips to make grading work for you without causing you unnecessary stress.

Know your district/school/department grading policy

Most schools will probably tell you at the beginning of the year. It should tell you how many grades are required, how many should be test/homework/daily, if students are allowed to redo work, etc.

Know when progress report and report card grades are due

...and don't wait until the last minute to enter grades. Not only will it be stressful at 4 pm to enter grades on the day they are due at 4:30. That will certainly be the day your computer starts acting up. I had a goal to enter 1-2 grades per week. Students and parents probably have online access to their grades and parents especially expect grades to updated regularly. It also isn't fair to a students who had an A the first week of grades to now be failing after a teacher waited 3 weeks to enter grades again. So, keep on top of it. 1-2 grades a week isn't unmanageable.

You also should wait to long because you are depriving students of feedback. One purpose of grades is for students to know how they are preforming in your class. If you only do two batches of grading in a grading period, students are not getting the proper feedback they need. (There are other ways to give feedback (I'll discuss later) If you are doing those other forms, use them as grades!

Don't grade students on responsibility

Some teachers won't agree with this one. I don't count off for late work. That's grading responsibility. There can certainly be other consequences: call home, lunch detention... but if a students doesn't turn in an assignment, I am not going to count off because it is late. I grade to know if they can do the work.

Let students fix their grades

You can let them make corrections of work you have passed back OR let them replace a grade with another assignment on a similar topic. For example, if a student got a 50 on an assignment about order of operations but then a week later did another assignment on order of operations and got an 80 -- I replace the first grade with the second grade. If the purpose of a gradebook reflects a student's understanding of the subject, that 50 is no longer an accurate reflection.

Find ways to make grading quick

Use SeeSaw, Quizizz, Self-Checking Assignments (like coloring pages), shortened assignments. Spot check assignments too. If a student can do the first 10 problems correctly, then possibly that's enough to know if they got it.

You don't have to grade everything. 

You just don't.

Don't take formative assessments as a grade

...unless you are willing to give students a similar assessment to improve their grade. The point of a formative assessment is to see where students are at and then to adjust your instruction. So students might not be ready for assessment and it isn't really fair to base their grade off of it.

Differentiate the assignments you take grades for. 

We have to standardized our state testing--but not in the classroom. If you only take grades on multiple choice assignments, you aren't letting some students show their potential. Have a variety of ways for students show what they know. Including verbal responses! If I pull a student for small group and they do a wonderful job explaining how to convert from a fraction to a percent -- I'll take a grade.

Try not to take grading home. 

If I took grading home over the weekend, it usually sat in my bag and made me feel guilty for not touching it. So make time to do it in 10-15 minutes bursts during the week.

Have student helpers

The worst part of grading for me was remembering to pass it back. I would always remember as students were leaving my room. So I created a file folder for each student and would give stacks of graded papers to students to file before or after school. Then I could just hand each student a stack of their papers. This also made it easy to make copies of students work that I was tracking for RtI or their IEPs.

My opinion on grading throughout my career has changed and I am sure it will change again before I finish. To be quite honest I think we should get rid of grades, reduce class sizes to 12-15 and have report cards be like Kindergarten ones that explain in words how a student is doing in class.

What are your thoughts on grading? Anything you agree or disagree with?