Getting Grades in the First 9 Weeks

[sjmason]

We are about to enter our third week of school and our first time experiencing and using Daily 5 and CAFÉ. My administration and academic coach are concerned with getting grades for the first nine weeks as we are not at point a where I can begin conferencing with my students to assess their skills individually. I hope to take some comprehension and vocabulary grades from my science and social studies times, but I know there will still be too few grades. What do some of you use in the early weeks? What has worked and is a true reflection of student progress or need?

[teri_dickinson]

I want to echo your concern about grades as my third grade teaching partner and I are in the same boat. We have given letter grades in the past and we know that we need to go about it differently with Daily 5 and CAFE, but with only four to five weeks left in the first grading period, we are also unsure about how this is going to work!

[srea]

I'm going to suggest a few places here on the website to help you think through grades at this time of year.

The first is a video of Gail and Joan discussing this topic with a teacher. https://www.thedailycafe.com/articles/sisters-on-the-spotcommunication-and-grades

The next is a link to an article about "Touch Points" that discusses how you could relate the rubric of 1-4 to student's work on specific strategies. https://www.thedailycafe.com/articles/touching-base-with-touch-points

This last link is to the area of the CAFE main page that shows us the assessments prepared for each strategy, and some related articles: https://www.thedailycafe.com/cafe/assessing-student-learning/assessing-each-strategy. Each of these assessments has a rubric to help you detemine the child's success level (which could probably turned into grades).

Hopefully, looking at these areas and the links noted there will help you find some ways to help you clarify your thinking. If you still have questions, please don't hesitate to post them here!!