Book Study and Making the Grade

Last week, I introduced my class to The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush by Tomie dePaola.  I used a unit from Reagan over at Tunstall's Teaching Tidbits.  We explored this complex text as we pulled it apart and discussed main character, setting, and opinion.

The children were given a project grade on this. At our school, we were asked to come up with a grading policy across each grade level.  Our first grade team decided our reading grade would consist of 25% tests, 25% high frequency words/fluency, 25% projects and 25% assignments.

We loved that this unit came with a rubric.  You can check out The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush in Reagan's TpT store by clicking on the picture below.


As we wrapped up the story last week, the students were asked to retell the story.  They were asked to include an introduction, beginning, middle, end and a conclusion.  We worked together to organize their thoughts in a FLEE map!  There will be more to come on this, but here is a snapshot of a student work sample. A FLEE map is a combination of a flow map and a tree map.  This was our first attempt at is and at took lots of modeling, directions and re-directions, but we made it!


The students then had to use the FLEE map as a guide to write their retelling of The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush.  A writing grade was taken on this.  Our language arts grades now consist of 25% spelling, 25% sentence dictation, 25% grammar and 25% writing.
 
I would love to hear your thought on grading.  Do you give numerical grades, letter grades or more general grades such as S's and N's?