Reaching for the Stars

I have been meaning to get this picture up for a while now, but haven't gotten to it until now. After looking through our NWEA scores as a class, students were able to see how their scores on the math, reading, and language tests this fall compared to the end of the year scores in second grade. While it is common for students to not make huge gains during the summer when they are out of school, a lot of your children were surprised by the test scores that they did see.

To prepare for looking at student scores, we used practice scores and bar graphs to compare data and learn about why teachers keep track of NWEA scores. Students graphed fake student scores and practiced making goals for the imaginary students based on what they saw. After we became familiar with those scores and the way they were graphed, students looked at their own scores and made real goals for themselves. They picked one test they wanted to improve the most and picked a strategy they could practice to help them improve that test score. Examples might be:

• I want to be better at reading so I will practice choosing just right books.
• I want to be better at math, so I will practice counting money.
• I want to be better at language, so I will practice using periods, question marks, and exclamation points. 

We traced our arms and wrote our goals on them. We decorated around our goals and hung them on a piece of black butcher paper with stars because we are aiming high with our goals, and reaching for the stars.  We know we will meet our goals on this winter's NWEA test because we see this poster every day and are reminded of what we need and want to do to make our scores go up.