Happy New Year's!! Last year was definitely a challenging year with trying to work on my masters full time, while teaching and having a family. I know my posts have been few and far between, but I'm hoping to start making more time to blog! Here are my goals for the next year! #5 Take more time for my family and myself! #4 Finish my last few classes and complete my Masters (I graduate in May..this will definitely free up some time to blog!!) #3 Get organized!!!! #2 Run at least 2 times a week...I want to do a 10k in April. #1 Loose the last stubborn 20 lbs (I've already lost almost 50lbs this past year!!) As you can see time seems to be a reoccurring theme with my goals for 2012!!! Even though I haven't been blogging much lately, I've still been stalking others blogs and of course pinning away! I came across an AWESOME blog: Ginger Snaps! It is definitely one of my new fav blogs! Going through her blog, I found a post about monitoring students' progress. This got me thinking about ways to have the students track their own progress. I have tried in the past to come up with a system...but nothing has really stuck! We recently took benchmarks after the Thanksgiving holiday. The students got their scores before we went on our winter holiday break. We have another benchmark in Feb., so I really wanted the students to set goals for them. This fits perfectly with New Year's resolutions! I did a search and found this great form created by Heather at Loose Shoelaces. I love this idea to have the students hold themselves accountable for reaching their goals and coming up with a plan to reach these goals. I took Heather's idea of the form and Ginger's idea of monitoring student's progress and created these forms. The first form I plan to sit down with each student to go over their benchmarks to discuss the areas they did well in and the ones they struggled with. They will set a goal for themselves and I too will set a goal for them. Then the students will come up with a plan of action to reach these goals. The second form is where the students will graph their weekly assessment scores. I allow retakes on assessment, so the students will graph their first score, as well their retake to show their progress. I think this will really help the students see their progress over time. I plan to use these forms when we return from our holiday break next week. I will update you on how well it worked or if I needed to make any adjustments to my plan. Enjoy - and please let me know if you have any success with the forms or if you have a system that allows you to help your students monitor their progress. Happy New Years!! Benchmark Goal Plan of Action Test Scores Graph