STANDARDS AND GOALS

A few years ago, our district told us to be sure that we were posting daily goals and standards around our classrooms.  I decided that I wanted to create a large display of our standards that I could add to throughout the year.  I titled it "6th Graders Can".  This gives students the opportunity to view all of the standards that they have learned throughout the year.  This also gives them a visual way to check themselves through the year, because they should be able to understand and explain everything that is on the wall.  I used colored sentence strips to display each of my standards because I have a bright colors theme going in my science lab.  As I mentioned before, I don't have much bulletin board space, and not a ton of wall space due to storage, lab counters and computers.  I ended up using wall space between two of my lab stations on a side wall.  It is not ideal, but the students do pay attention to it as they are moving about the room and it looks neat as it begins to fill up around this time in the year. 

 To display our daily goals, I decided to also use our standards.  I display each standard on my front board (I rarely use my whiteboard for instruction because I use my SmartBoard most of the time, so I reserve it for our daily goals, vocabulary, homework and reminders) as we are working on it, and then move it to our "6th Graders Can" display after we have mastered it.  Right now, we are learning about Earthquakes and Volcanoes.  This is what our goal is currently:

Displaying our goal standard on the front board has actually been very helpful to the students and me.  It is a reminder for me to make sure that I mention it to the students so that they know what they are mastering.  I think that it helps them be in control of their learning a little more.  Additionally, our district implemented "walk-throughs' which are like mini 5 minute evaluations on a frequent basis.  Having the goal displayed gives the students something to reference as they discuss what they are learning with our administrators.