Do you have to grade everything? Goodness, no, and here's why!

Raise your hand if you've brought your teacher bag home for the weekend loaded with papers to grade, and it lived in your car all weekend.  

I'm not here to talk about online grading systems vs. paper.  This post is about whether you have to do *all the things.*

Leaving your bag in the car all weekend may be your first indication that something needs to give.  Your students do a lot of work in the process of learning and not everything needs to be returned to them.  Some of it is just practice.  

If you feel that you must grade, then follow the suggestions that several veteran teachers I know have provided.

• Select a few responses to check, say 3-5 problems or sentences.  Don't give the work a grade, but instead provide feedback, so this becomes a formative assessment of their learning. That's a suggestion from Lisa at A Math Mission along with other tips you might want to read about!

• Sometimes it's nice to use digital products that grade for you and Google and Boom cards are two easy resources to take advantage of!

Lisa has a number of self-checking resources in her math store on TeachersPayTeachers.

So does Mary Jenkins in her store Middle Grades Math with Mary Jenkins.  

• Do you use Interactive Notebooks with your students?  I did.  It took students a while to get the cutting and gluing part of it, but once they did, they used them all year long!

Lynda of Teaching Science with Lynda R. Williams talks about how she grades them.  I like that her philosophy is similar to Lisa's as she suggests how to have students focus on one important item for you to grade.  You can read her suggestions here.

Ginny of Polka Dots and Protons has also come up with a grading system for Science notebooks.  You can read her suggestions here.

I hope this brief blog post with lots of links has shown you a way to lessen the overwhelm of feeling like you need to grade all the things!