MASTERING the standards with your students

Need help ensuring your students are mastering the standards? Check out this new product line from The Sparkly Notebook!

In case you don’t know, I am extremely standards focused!

Ha! That surely isn’t a surprise by now.

I love the standards and feel they are amazing guides to ensure we provide the quality education our students need and deserve. 

With that being said, it can be quite difficult to design our curriculum in a way that covers ALL of the standards. For a complete list of the standards for your state, click HERE!

For example, RI2 for seventh-grade states, “Determine two or more central ideas in a text and analyze their development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary of the text.” Sounds relatively easy in theory, but when we break it down, there can be some gray area.

What exactly does it mean to analyze the development of the central idea?

And although an objective summary sounds easy enough, it is requiring students to do a couple of things first. Students must filter out the subjective information from the text and then shorten the information into a concise format…both of which can be quite difficult for our youth.

So, how do we as teachers ensure that our students are mastering the standards?

To ensure your students are mastering the standards, we need to do the following three things:

• First, we need to deconstruct the standards to ensure we know exactly what we are teaching! Use one of The Sparkly Notebook’s standard checklists to help you out!
• Second, we need to map out our curriculum guide to make sure our assessment plan for the academic year will cover each standard. This should be a process you complete with the other core teachers in your particular subject area.
• Third, we need to design lessons that fully cover the standards, providing an opportunity for students to MASTER each standard. This is the fun part, and yet, it can be daunting at times.

But, guess what!?!

At The Sparkly Notebook, we came up with a new product line to help ya’ll out!

First of all…

Second, we created one product for EVERY standard!

Say what?!?

Check them all out here, but I’ll explain how it works!

Let’s use the same standard from earlier in the blog.

RI.7.2

“Determine two or more central ideas in a text and analyze their development over the course of the text; provide an objective summary of the text.”

First, we broke down the standard for you into three objectives:

1. I can determine two or more central ideas in a text
2. I can analyze the development of two or more central ideas over the course of a text.
3. I can produce an objective summary of the text.

Then, we wrote a passage, created a question set, and created an activity for each objective in the standard. Basically, we did all the hard, time-consuming work and laid it out on a platter for you!

Check out the RI.7.2 standard product here!

Once you dive into the standard products, you can even add supplementary material to your lesson as well. My favorite one for the RI.7.2 standards is this TikTok Digital Passage set. My students are obsessed with TikTok and many have enjoyed this supplementary lesson!

If you have any questions…

about breaking down the standards or using standards in general to build your curriculum, I would love for you to reach out! Feel free to also visit this blog for more information!