The SmartRubric Blog | SmartRubric

See how your students stack up by A.O. across multiple assessments.  I've added another high level report  to SmartRubric. Now, if you would like to see how students in your class have performed by strand  across all of your assessments, you can! This is going to be super useful for exam preparation, because you'll be able to spot trends and weak spots at a glance.  To access your Gap Analysis Gradebook, just go into your normal gradebook (Classes > {your class}), and click on the 'Gap Analysis View' link next to the gradebook title:  This will take you into the Gap Analysis gradebook, and you can do all of the usual things, like showing and hiding columns and exporting to CSV. 

I'd like to share a really simple, one-off lesson that is both fun and really digs deeply into some technical aspects of creative writing. It was my go-to lesson whenever I had to do cover for an English class (best for year 8 & up): it fits beautifully into a 55 minute slot (with plenty of scope for extension if you teach longer lessons) and requires no prep, powerpoint or resources. It's fun, and it resulted in a lot of 'aha' moments for kids and hilarious writing. Sold? Good. Try this lesson: Objective: Explore the effects of choices about tense and voice in your creative writing BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Get each student to choose a number between 1 and 3 , and a letter between a and c . Have them write this down on a piece of paper and swear solemnly not to change it after the lesson begins. Extension for very able students: add another letter - either y or z. Starter:   Outline this simple plot: A boy is walking down the road, holding a balloon. A car goes...

It's exam prep season, which means that sadly, KS3 probably isn't getting much love at the moment. To rectify this, I'm going to share a couple of really easy English Speaking and Listening lesson formats that take approximately zero planning and work from years 7-9, plus a couple of downloadable rubrics to make sure that you're evidencing progress. If you're just here for the freebie rubrics, I've bundled together a discussion rubric and a presentation/speech rubric. You can download the bundle  here . It's aligned with the current National Curriculum expectations for KS3 English, but you could easily adapt them up or down.  As always, if you are a SmartRubric user, you can bypass the printable and use the interactive version of these rubrics. It means all of your rich formative assessment data will be automatically captured, and targets, levels and grades will be generated for all of your students. They're in the template library. If you aren...

Here's the problem: Student presentations are boring. One student is talking, and twenty-nine students are bored out of their skulls. The problem compounds itself as time goes by, and you need a class full of orators to avoid a riot by minute 45. It goes without saying that you should limit the number of student presentations per lesson, but the X-Factor format helps too. Here's how you do it:  Pull a long table or three desks into the center of the room, facing the front. This is where your judges sit. Everyone else is audience. In front of each judge seat, stick a copy of the  presentation rubric . In fact, every student in your class should have one. Give the judges a stopwatch, and a whiteboard or a big bit of paper and a marker for scores.  The judges should be rotated out every couple of presentations, and it's a great way to give That Kid a place to showboat a little bit in a productive way. The judges have strict rules for criticism. They must be constru...

This was an emergency exam prep lesson and it ended up being one of my favourites ever. I used it with my middle ability KS4 English group because I had had enough of my students telling me that the [quote] had a 'positive feeling' or made the audience feel 'shocked'. They simply didn't have the vocabulary or confidence to talk about emotion or feelings in a sophisticated way, much less in connection to a text. Now, as I said, I used this for KS4, but it would absolutely work at KS3 -- in fact, the earlier that kids learn to talk about this the better. Having the vocabulary to talk about emotion helps people parse feelings and be mindful about them which is  incredibly important for life .  Here's how it works. Configure your room in such a way that kids can sit in groups of three or four. Put a big piece of paper in the middle of each group. On each paper, write down six major emotions mind-map node style:  Set a timer. For ten minutes, get studen...