GPS Sign-Ups
I'm going to be honest here. This week felt extremely long. The Christmas holidays are now in the oh-so-distant past and I'm starting to gear up for report cards. Don't get me wrong...I'm not ready to start writing them but my thoughts are definitely turning towards assessment and evaluation.
For my band students (Grades 7 & 8) I use an OMEA program called GPS. I'm not going to go into too much detail here but basically it is a series of tasks that students need to complete before the end of each term. The number of tasks they complete correspond to a letter grade which makes up the playing part of their Music mark.
This is my second year using this program and I love it! One of the challenges I came across last year was "How do students sign up to play a task?" Since I was on a cart at one school I was limited in how I set up my sign-up sheet. I ended up using the classic clipboard with a weekly chart where students signed up ahead of time. There were a number of problems that I ran into:
For my band students (Grades 7 & 8) I use an OMEA program called GPS. I'm not going to go into too much detail here but basically it is a series of tasks that students need to complete before the end of each term. The number of tasks they complete correspond to a letter grade which makes up the playing part of their Music mark.
This is my second year using this program and I love it! One of the challenges I came across last year was "How do students sign up to play a task?" Since I was on a cart at one school I was limited in how I set up my sign-up sheet. I ended up using the classic clipboard with a weekly chart where students signed up ahead of time. There were a number of problems that I ran into:
- I often forgot to print out a new sign-up sheet every week which annoyed my students!
- Some students would sign up and then forget to show up which annoyed me and my students!
- I just wasted a lot of paper.
Over the summer I came across this pin on pinterest:
I don't have much wall space in my classroom but I do have a wall that has a peg board on it so I used some metal pegs, cardstock, ribbon, and clothespins to create my new GPS sign-up.
I love this and especially love that I don't have to waste paper or remember to print off new sheets each week. Students sign up with their clothespin when they are physically in my room so that avoids the problem of people not showing up. Some tricky kids do put their clothespin ahead of others but the other kids tend to police that themselves. Next year I might laminate the class cards (8A, 7B) to prevent them from getting ripped off the hook but so far I've just had to repair the 7A card. I tried using duct tape but it kept falling off so I just stapled the bottom of the hole and it has been holding up no problem!
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