Day 7: The First Weekly Quiz

6th Grade Math Standards: 6.NS. Fluently add, subtract, multiply, and divide multi-digit decimals using the standard algorithm for each operation.

Learning Objective: Multiply multi-digit factors to find a product.

Quote of the Day: "Immigrants are four times as likely to become millionaires as American born citizens." - Steve Siebold

Question of the Day: What is the difference between the dividend and the divisor?

Assessment: In one class I gave an exit ticket of give three ways to check your work, in all classes I checked the homework, and circumvented the room for the classwork.

Agenda:

1. Fix the mistake
2. Quote, Star Students, Question of the Day
3. Homework Review 
4. Division Practice D (starting with the word problems)
5. Weekly Quiz parent letter passed out and read by the students in partners
6. Weekly Quiz explained orally by me
7. Students did a Weekly Quiz jumpstart to become more acquainted with the confusing routine of getting feedback from teachers, staying after school if they need help, etc. 
8. Division Practice D continued (last class started their weekly quiz)

Glass Half-Full Take: We successfully passed out the weekly quiz on a Monday. This is typically the way that the WQ routine works, but in all past years we have used half days to tell students about the weekly quiz and half days are never on a Monday. Since there were no September half days this year our hand was forced. To give up a full day though just to explain a routine on day seven of the school year is a bit much though, so we successfully integrated a regular math class in the first block and used the other block to explain the weekly quiz away.

Regrets: I need to give more in class time to start the weekly quiz and less time for students to work on Division Practice D. I gave essentially the same assignment for homework over the weekend, and the results really do not change much. Given how much time I spend explaining how a weekly quiz is done, the students naturally want to try that. At the end of the day it's math and I want them to be successful on this particular assignment so that they know it's possible to have success for the next twenty-four.

Homework: I assigned Division Practice D (another regret) as well as Weekly Quiz #1.

Link of the Day: This article from Edutopia discusses grouping, but I particularly found this line enlightening. "Investing in the small setup cost (time) of priming your students will highly increase class productivity." Nice way to advocate pre-assessment.