Writing Progress
About five or six years ago, I gave a set of magnetic tiles to my son's former fifth grade teacher for her to try out because I was thinking about having them manufactured so that teachers don't have to make their own sets of tiles.
See Ready Made Magnets for sets you can purchase.
My thought was that she--and the other five teachers given sets--would be able to provide some feedback that would help to make the product a better one. A week after dropping them off, I returned to her classroom and saw this great adaptation for using the tiles.
She was using them to help monitor the progress of her students as they worked their way through a writing activity. The poster shown below provided everyone with a reminder of the writing assignment requirements.
Below the assignment standards, she created an area for indicating each student's writing progress. The tiles below show where everyone was after a couple of days of writing.
My contribution to the process was the red butcher paper taped to the white board. Since I had provided sample tiles in white, I thought the red paper background would make for a more legible, higher-contrast display.
Here's a picture from the same classroom a year later. For the record, the teacher is using the tiles now available for purchase. You'll also notice that levels of progress have increased from 3 to 6. That's quite a jump in just one year.
