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My Grading Notebook

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Yesterday was a monumental day for me as I worked in my classroom because . . . I got rid of my filing cabinet!!!  Last year I got rid of the teacher desk, this year the filing cabinet.  I am trying hard to reclaim the space in my classroom for my kiddos.  Since I am now in kindergarten this is so important because we spend more time around the room than we do at the desks.  But all that to say that in my digging and purging, I stumbled upon a little gem – my Grading Notebook that I used in 3rd grade.  Today I want to share it with you because it made my life sooooooo much easier!

This was the dilemma that led to the grading notebook:  I had students who did not turn their work in on time!  I know – shocker huh!  Then there were those kiddos that were absent.  Well either way I found myself doing double, triple, quadruple work.  I would grade the class set of work and start by working all the math problems to create my master.  A few days later a late paper would come in and I couldn’t find my master so I’d do it again.  The next week, another paper, create a new master.  End of the quarter push to get rid of all missing work, and there I was creating yet another master before I graded this same assignment.  I know what you are thinking and I don’t really have an excuse other than it was in one of my stacks!  (See Confessions of a Stacker if you don’t understand)  I would get so frustrated grading papers because I knew there had to be a more efficient way.  So I created a Grading Notebook.

As you can see it is just a plain old spiral notebook.  But this little notebook was like gold to me!  Inside the notebook I created ALL of my grading keys.  I would write the assignment name, the date, and all the answers.  It looked like this:

When I graded papers this notebook was always with me.  A later paper would come in and instead of redoing it, all I had to do was find the assignment and grade!.  As the year went on, I even noted down things like how many points off per question, or my actual grading scale (0=100, 1=86, etc.) if it was different than the norm.  I can’t tell you how much time this saved me.

Now I hope that no one has the same problem and frustration with grading papers that I did, but if you do, give the grading notebook a try!  It sure made my life easier!  If you have a tip about how you make the paper grading process more efficient, please share!

Thanks for stopping by!

Comments

  1. Katy says

    I'm not a spreadsheet person so I love the notebook idea. Sometimes I feel like I'm not a good teacher because I'm not super organized all the time but I love this notebook idea. Thanks 🙂

  2. Katy says

    I'm not a spreadsheet person so I love the notebook idea. Sometimes I feel like I'm not a good teacher because I'm not super organized all the time but I love this notebook idea. Thanks 🙂

  3. Beth says

    I’m sure this is super helpful as you teach so many different things every day. As a high school math teacher I keep a binder for each course organized by units so I can just transfer the current unit for each course into my main “current units” binder and have just it with me whenever I’m grading. This works great unless a student is turning in work for a unit more than two weeks past. In that case I usually just have an “I’ll get to it when I get to it” pile…

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