Wednesday

Today we talked about two important subjects: Planners and Rubrics.

In the morning, we discussed how important planners can be in middle school. We discussed that a planner should have three things: schedule, school plans, and personal plans. We also talked about how there are two things we need to do to make our planner effective; write our homework down in it,  and then check it at home to ensure we've remembered everything. We talked about what we can write in planners and how to save time when recording long term assignments or upcoming tests by using a "study line" where we write "test" or "project" and the due date on the day it is assigned followed by a line that crosses through all the days until the day it is due. That way, when we look at our planner and see a line, we know that we have something previously assigned to do for homework without having to write it four, five, six times. We also talked about different abbreviations we can use in the planner to save space. Finally we talked about prioritizing. By including our personal plans in our planner, we can better plan for things like longer assignments or upcoming tests by seeing that one night we are very busy with extracurricular activities while another night we have additional time. We talked about managing our time and remembering that we should tackle to most important items first before moving on. I encouraged them to number their assignments 1, 2, and 3 with what they are going to work on first, second, and third when they begin homework. They practiced writing down assignments in a planner and created "Homework" assignments for other students to practice writing down.

This afternoon we discussed rubrics. We talked about how important it is to use the rubrics to double check our work according to what the teacher is grading us on. We looked at a student's health project that they received a poor score on and compared it to the rubric to discover what they did wrong and could have done differently to improve the grade. The kids had a great discussion regarding self-checking and using the rubric as a sort of checklist when looking over our work.

Tomorrow we will discuss note-taking strategies!