Get more out of Exit Slips: What the research tells us

Many of us use exit slips for formative assessment. According to Robert Marzano, there are four main categories of prompts that will help you get the most out of exit slips.

These prompts accomplish the following:

• Check for understanding
• Encourage reflection
• Check the use of instructional strategies
• Request student feedback on teacher practices

We have assembled a set of FREE exit slips based on the first three prompts. While you may want to target additional feedback in your class, preparing your exit slips ahead of time can be a time-saver that will elicit solid feedback.

We have found that adding space for students to record their learning targets also encourages them to reflect on the focus of the lesson.

Source: "The Many Uses of Exit Slips" by Robert Marzano in Educational Leadership, October 2012 (Vol. 70, #2, p. 80-81).

Download our FREE exit slips here!

We LOVE to READ the SONnets BY the BARD!

The HAPpy GOATS are GRAZing IN the GRASS.

They LIKE to EAT the FLOwers AND the HAY.

And AFter THAT they'll READ a SHAKEspeare PLAY!


We could speak in iambic pentameter all day, but we'll let these charming goats do the talking (bleating?) for us. This poster serves as an excellent visual aid to help students understand the rhythm of iambic pentameter. It's available as a high-resolution 20" x 30" digital download, and there is also a mini version (8.5" x 11") that comes free with our Sonnet Lesson Plan. If you happen to have access to an enormous printer, then hey, that's great! Otherwise, you can do what we did and send the file to Walgreens (or Kinkos, or any other online printing service).

As it turns out, behinds are a BIG HIT with the middle school crowd. The poster we put up created such a buzz that another class took a "field trip" down the hall just to marvel at the goat butt. We think Shakespeare would be proud. 

FYI, this poster is also available as a hard copy print in several sizes from Zazzle!

"What need I fear of thee?": Teaching Shakespeare's Sonnets

Spoiler Alert: Shakespeare is not as scary as your students might think. 

Actually, we don't find him very scary at all. (Well, maybe some of his tragedies qualify as scary...)

Teaching Shakespeare shouldn't have to be intimidating either; one great method of introducing his work to your students is to start with one of his 154 sonnets. Read one of our favorites here:

    Sonnet 18

    By William Shakespeare

    Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 

    Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

    And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 

    Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

    And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 

    And every fair from fair sometime declines,

    By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

    But thy eternal summer shall not fade

    Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

    Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

    When in eternal lines to time thou growest: 

       So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

       So long lives this and this gives life to thee. 

 
Our CCSS-aligned Sonnets Lesson Plan includes activities, a poster, and instructions, and it uses "Sonnet 18" as a starting point. From there, students learn about the structure, form, and meaning of this sonnet. They stomp and shout the syllables of iambic pentameter, and then they practice using extended metaphors, rhythm, and argumentation. Step-by-step plans take five or six days, and students will emerge unscathed, having analyzed a sonnet and written one of their own!



We agree that Old English may sometimes prove challenging, but the words quatrain, couplet, and volta should be part of any young poet's vocabulary. Check out our store for more details.

Celebrate Shakespeare's Birthday (on any day)!

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564, and he died on the same day in 1616. We think that if Shakespeare were here to celebrate his 449th birthday, he would absolutely love the party we cooked up in his honor.

Our Shakespeare's Birthday Party set features a colorful poster and 32 task cards featuring fun trivia and lines from Shakespeare's plays. It also includes a "modernize Shakespeare" activity, where students update a line drawing of Shakespeare by cutting, gluing, drawing, and otherwise transforming to bring his image into the 21st century. (Middle school students have a ton of fun equipping Shakespeare with Kindles, iPods, and Kanye glasses.) The party is a great way to kick off a Shakespeare unit or to introduce him to apprehensive students!

The set also includes 12 printable cupcake wrapper templates (both in color and in black-and-white). The wraps feature our own original artwork of a coy little Shakespearean cat and dog donning their Elizabethan best, and quotes from Shakespeare plays. Some of the quotes we included are these:

"If music be the food of love, play on." (Twelfth Night)
"Prepare for mirth, for mirth becomes a feast." (Pericles, Prince of Tyre)
"Honey, and milk, and sugar; there is three." (Love's Labours Lost)

Look at how adorable the cupcakes turned out! The wraps in the picture below were printed in black-and-white on colored paper.

And these were printed in color. If you happen to own a fancy pair of scissors (like the ones that can cut in zigzags or waves), they would probably add an excellent touch.

Yum! Educational and delicious! Olive the cat was quite fond of them too.



You can download four of the cupcake templates for free here!