Most schools or districts have one to two weeks off from school for winter break.
Maintain your science instructional momentum by hosting a Winter Break Challenge!
To get the most out of your Winter Break Challenge, try the following:
- Identify 2 low-performing standards. Analyze the results from a diagnostic or formative assessment activity to find 2 standards of concern.
- Haven’t assigned an assessment activity yet? Then use your class or grade-level mastery reports to look for standards that could use some more practice.
- Or, assign activities for standards taught at the beginning of the school year before you were using Penda with your students.
- Assign the Developing, Achieving, and Exceeding activities for the 2 standards you have selected.
- Run and analyze a report upon returning from the break to see how your students did on the Winter Break Challenge.
- With our new reports enhancement coupled with the date range filters, we have made it substantially easier for teachers to run a report for a specific class period and identify students based upon set criteria:
- Sort hours column to honor students with the most amount of time.
- Sort total activities column to honor students with most activities attempted.
- Sort green activities count column to honor students with the highest achievement scores.
- Here are 2 possible frameworks to build and incentivize the challenge:
- Option 1:
- Reward students based upon the following 3 criteria (for which students can be recognized more than once):
- Hours of engagement (task hours)
- Activities attempted (effort)
- Activities mastered (achievement)
- For each challenge criteria, do 'shout-outs' for students in the top tier (perhaps the top third of students in that category) and provide them with a raffle ticket that goes into a big fishbowl. Students get more chances for drawings the more hours they put in, the more activities they attempt, and the more activities they master.
- Draw various prize/incentive items from the fishbowl - front of the line pass, free homework pass, extra points on quiz or test, McDonald's gift cards, Amazon gift cards, Nintendo Switch for a school-wide give-away.
- Reward students based upon the following 3 criteria (for which students can be recognized more than once):
- Option 2:
- Reward students based upon the number of activities they've mastered that are part of the challenge.
To make it easy for students to find the challenge:
*Create one assignment that includes “Winter Break Challenge” in the name and includes all activities for the challenge.
*Give the Winter Break Challenge start and end dates that cover days off for school break.
