I anticipate my students will finish their first unit test at varying rates tomorrow. I always take my own tests as if I were the student. I show all the work. I time myself. I multiply my time by 3 and then by 4, establishing what I believe is a fair range of minutes to expect students to be able to complete the assessment. I learned this rule-of-thumb from I’m-not-exactly-sure where, but it has worked quite accurately through the years. I finished tomorrow’s test in less than 7 minutes, so I fear it may be too brief!
All that to say, my students will need something meaningful to do when they finish the test that meets the following criteria:
A) They must try the meaningful thing individually and silently (others will still be testing… think anchor activity)
and
B) For those who don’t have time left to do this meaningful thing, they can’t be penalized, if you will, if they need the entire period to complete priority #1 – the test.
ThingLink has been my go-to tool for moments like this. I noticed some problems in the upcoming unit make assumptions about students’ prior knowledge, and a ThingLink that addresses this would help. Some of the similar figure problems assume students can recognize vertical angles, and that students know that vertical angles are congruent. We haven’t addressed any types of angles at all, so ThingLink will do a little bit of pre-teaching for me. Maybe I went overboard by including other angle relationships, but I’m hoping it helps when we eventually study a geometry unit later.
The ThingLink topic of angle relationships reminded me of a website I had to design a few years back as an assignment for a grad class. I forgot about this little project! Time to put it to use by linking several “nubbins” to it. Remember when xtranormal was such amazing technology? 😉
For ideas on how to use ThingLink for “Pre-Teaching” check this out.
How are you using ThingLink?
What other strategies do you use for awkward moments like providing meaningful tasks for students to do after completing a test?
