Level Up Board in Action!

You may have seen the pictures of my classroom and noticed some Super Mario characters gracing one of my bulletin boards.  The inspiration for this came from the Bump It Up boards I'd heard about at a PD session last year and a quote from the Flip Your Classroom book about leveling up.  Now that we've been in school for about a month, the Level Up board is getting a lot more use.

Leveling up our answers to a scientific question.

Source

I make sure that the students are part of updating the board too.  The first thing they leveled-up was a procedure I'd written in their note packages and read in my best Cletus Spuckler voice:

First I'm gonna plant some tomato seeds.  Then I'm gonna give them different amounts of water.  Then I'm gonna measure which one's the tallest.



I asked them what level they thought I'd give for that procedure - they were a little surprised when I said I wouldn't waste my time marking it!  Then we went through in groups with clear instructions how to level up those procedures.  They alternated writing for Levels 1, 2, 3, 4 and their homework was to write a level 4+ on their own.  I chose the best examples of each level and put it up on the board for the students to refer to while they were working on their borax bouncy balls scientific inquiry unit.

No surprise that you'd expect more writing for a Level 4!

Another leveling up activity we tried was on how to write a response to a question.  I find many students come to me with a hard time answering a question.  Details like using keywords from the question in the answer, reading the entire question and explaining with support are often lacking.  I am loving this Level Up board, and I think it is being really helpful - but we will see on their next quiz!