Back to school season is one of the most challenging times of the year. But there are some ways to reduce your stress and stay sane this year. Here are 5 tips to help out new and veteran teachers alike:​ 

Tip #1:  Keep a paper copy of parent information. 
​It's inevitable that just when the computer system, or the internet, or the power, or some other form of infrastructure goes out, you will need to be able to get ahold of a parent. I keep a lot of information on my computer, but I always, always have a binder with a paper copy that includes parent information and student transportation information.

During back to school night, I have my parents complete my Important Information Sheet. One simple page, hole punched, stuck in a binder, and I always have the ability to call home, and get my kids home. I also take this same binder with me on every field trip. I can't tell you how many times I've used it.

Tip #3: Have puzzles ready during one on one assessments. 
Puzzles are fabulous for so many things - academic skills, problem solving skills, etc. However, they are also something that can easily be picked up and put back down without stressing out the classroom or your students too much. For this reason, I use puzzles as what the class is working on while I need to pull students for one on one assessments in the beginning of the year.

Sometimes I use regular jigsaw puzzles, but most often I use Self-Correcting Puzzles or Tiling Puzzles. We all know that there's too much curriculum to cover, so having students beginning to play with curriculum puzzles before I start teaching curriculum gives them a foot up and starts building background knowledge. For additional ideas on how to keep kids busy during assessments, check out my blog post - How to Keep Students Engaged While You Are Doing Assessments.

Tip#4: Observe your students working in groups. 
How students interact with each other will dictate the types of activities you will and won't be able to complete with your students this year. During the first two weeks, have students work on a variety of activities in groups, when you are NOT busy assessing, organizing supplies, or other beginning of the year activities. While they are working, walk around with a clipboard and take notes. Who are your natural leaders? Who gets off task easily? Who takes over and doesn't let others work? Who doesn't want to participate? Better than any get to know you game, watching kids interact with their peers will tell you a lot about the personalities, abilities, and motivations of your students. 
Pinterest is full of cute STEM ideas that would work for these group projects, but if you need to start building in curriculum, think outside the box. Have the kids work in a group to create a mini test using my Be the Teacher worksheets, or have students work together to complete an internet scavenger hunt. Really any assignment can be made into a group task that you can observe to gather this information. 

Tip #5: Start practicing math facts from the get go. 
I have never worked at a school that didn't have a goal of building math fact fluency.  We generally wait for about a month before we start taking stock of where we are and what we need to do. And then very often we spent a lot of time going back and re-teaching or re-practicing the facts from the previous year. I have never understood this delay.

I start math facts on the first couple of days, often starting with last year's facts to build up confidence. Then when everyone else is build a routine a month in, my kids are already used to daily practice. Plus, they have often refreshed their memory of last year's facts and are ready to move on to more challenging facts. I use my Math Fact Quiz package to meet  my kids wherever they are in the spectrum of fact fluency over all 4 operations.

As we approach the 2020/2021 school year, more and more districts are choosing to stick with distance learning. So, we are especially focused on how we are going to teach from a distance. But how many of us have thought about how we are going to assess kiddos from a distance? So much of my informal assessments come from me observing how my students are doing in small group. Without being able to sit next to my students, how am I going to assess their current level? Without seeing them, how do I know that the work on the screen is actually theirs? One strategy I plan to use is video, specifically using the website FlipGrid.

FlipGrid in the Traditional Classroom
FlipGrid is a website I have used in my classroom since we got Chromebooks. It allows students to record short videos of themselves and share them with me and their classmates in a safe and secure way.

In my traditional classroom, I used FlipGrid in a few different ways. One great way was to allow students to explain their thinking for math word problems to the video camera. This practice allowed students to justify their thinking verbally before they tried to write it out. This helped them to gather their thoughts and think about their word choice. Additionally, it allowed me to go back and watch the kiddos who I was unable to work with in small group for whatever reason.

Additionally, I have used FlipGrid to help students work on reading fluency, as they recorded themselves reading the same book multiple times. This allowed them to see how they were growing as readers in a very visual way. And it was a great way to show growth to parents during conferences!

Using FlipGrid with Distance Learning
With the advent of distance learning, FlipGrid can become so much more. It can allow for you to see the individual thinking of each student. You as the teacher can create a mini lesson video and add it to an assignment. Additionally, students can create response videos to their classmates, so they can actually have a digitally delayed discourse on a topic. Here are some of the ways I can see FlipGrid being helpful for Virtual Education:
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 - Teachers might read a story or poem to the students and/or post a video in FlipGrid of this read aloud. Each student can then respond to the text with a video of their own. Either they can all respond to the same question, or you can do a "virtual jigsaw" and have each student answer a different question. Students can then go back and watch the videos of their classmates to gather additional information that they hadn't thought to include.

  - Teachers might assign a math problem or post a math mini lesson video with a problem at the end of the video. Each student can then solve the math problem and create a video explaining their thinking. Again, differentiation can be put into play by assigning different groups of students different problems to answer.

 - Before writing about a topic, students may create a video discussing what they know about a topic. This can serve as their pre-writing to help get their ideas into order. Additionally, when students complete their writing, they might share it with the class by reading it into a FlipGrid video.

 - After completing research or lessons on a topic, students might create a presentation video to teach the rest of the class what they learned. In fact, my Student Created Tutorial Videos Planning Sheet works great for helping kiddos plan out videos like this.

These are just a few ways to use FlipGrid for both learning and assessment. How will you use this powerful website this school year?

At each school I have taught at there has been a need to use interventions with certain students, and to track the effectiveness of these interventions using data. This intervention process often has a different name depending on where you teach. The two most common that I have come across are: Response to Intervention (RTI) and Student Assistance Team (SAT). However, I've also seen it called (SST) Student Support Team, and even (Triple I) Immediate Intensive Intervention. Whatever it's called at your school, it means finding interventions that will close gaps for students to give them the best chance at success. And whatever you call it, in order to do it successfully, you must have a way of knowing if what you're doing is helping our students. This means you have to collect data.

Unfortunately, this often means more class time needed to collect that data, which we don't always have. So this year I have worked hard on using technology to help me collect some of that data. Saves class time, and teacher sanity! Here are the tech tools I've used:

1.) Google Forms - Using Google Forms is a great way to create a simple, pinpointed quiz for any topic that your students are struggling with. For reading, this could be a comprehension quiz. For phonics, you could insert a picture and ask students to choose the correctly written word. For math, it could be a few questions on a specific topic. 

Any multiple choice questions assigned through Google Forms will be graded for you, with only open ended questions left for you to grade. You also have the choice of students taking the quiz once, or multiple times. You can release the "correct answers" to your students, or choose not to.  You can assign the test to one student or to your whole class. The options are so limitless!

For intervention students, I use Google Forms in 2 ways. First, I pull data from the weekly quizzes I give to all of my students in order to see if my kiddos are applying what they're learning in small group with me to their "mainstream" activities. Secondly, I have a few quizzes for common skills that I give only to my students working on those skills. I make a copy just for them and have them take the same quiz multiple times (every 2 weeks for so) so that I can track how they are achieving on that specific skill. 

2.) XtraMath - Basic math fact fluency is often one of my student's intervention goals. Increasing understanding of how numbers go together and increasing speed of retrieving facts are also both vital for students working on more complex math standards - like problem solving. Working on math fact fluency in small group is easy, right? You work on patterns, songs, flash cards, games, etc. However, collecting the data can be more complex. 
For a long time, I used my Math Fact Quizzes because I could easily have students date them and use them to keep track of fact fluency data. However, we are now restricted on the number of copies we can make because administration wants us using our Chromebooks to their full capacity. So now I use the website XtraMath. Students work on it for 10 - 15 minutes a day and I get a full report of what problems they attempted, what problems they mastered and what problems they maintained. 

3.) Flipgrid - We all know that the best way to assess knowledge of a subject is to sit one on one with each child. However, time rarely allows for that in the classroom. Instead, I use the website Flipgrid for students to create videos on themselves discussing their thinking.

Math problem solving is a common skill I work on during intervention time. Obviously math word problems is your go-to assessment for if they are able to solve the problem correctly. However, to truly understand how my kiddos are getting to their answers, I need them to explain their thinking. So, I have my students record their thinking into Flipgrid and use those videos to assess their understanding and determine where I need to intervene.

Additionally, reading fluency is super easy to assess using Flipgrid because you can set the timer to create a 1 minute video. Students read their set passage for 1 minute, close the computer and move on. You can then go back and watch the videos, count the words and really get a picture of their fluency. In addition, you can play those videos for parents during their SAT meeting. How much more powerful is a video of their kiddo reading than you telling them "She currently reads 35 words per minute."

Collecting data on students is not my favorite part of the job, but these tech tools have made it so much more manageable. This type of data collection has also made the focus truly on getting better interventions, instead of just on having data to put on forms for meetings. Since our focus should be on kids instead of data, I'd say that is a win, win!