Authored by Hannah Le Blanc
If there is one school supply that screams “Lower School,” I think it would be a fresh sheet of manila paper. Or maybe, not a fresh sheet, but a sheet that has been sitting in the stack in the workroom for about 15 years. Why did this become such a thing? Why not white paper? A quick google search shows that it is a relatively cheap product that is made from a less refined process than other paper. So I guess that’s why we use it. But I digress.
Manila paper happens to also be a powerful tool for checking for understanding. When I first came to St. Andrew’s, as a baby teacher fresh out of grad school, I was placed on a team with St. Andrew’s royalty – Judy Menist, Anne Ranck, and Susan Maples. Through their sage wisdom, I learned the power of a sheet of manila paper to check for understanding. Each week, they would put “8 Boxes” on the plans. This activity gets its name from the fact that you take a large (12 x 18) piece of manila paper, and with great patience, you instruct your students to fold it into halves, fourths, and finally… eighths. At the beginning of the year, that may take all morning! In each square, we would have the student write a word that followed the weekly phonics rule. It wasn’t a spelling word that they had memorized, but instead, it was a novel word that used the spelling pattern. Students were tasked with writing the new word, then decoding it and drawing an illustration for the word in that box. And there you have it… if they could correctly apply their knowledge of the spelling pattern or phonetic elements and draw a matching picture, you knew that they could read that pattern. And they never knew it was a check for understanding.
Fast forward to moving to 2nd grade and… wouldn’t you know, when I asked Rachel Newman how she likes to check for understanding with vocabulary, she led me to the workroom and gave me a stack of manila paper and told me to have the students fold the paper into eighths. For each vocabulary word, students are tasked with coming up with their own, unique sentence showing they can use the word in context and then draw an illustration to go with it. Not only does it show what they know, but it lets them be creative and makes a vocabulary assessment far more engaging than a quiz or a test. This year, I even had a student turn all of the sentences into a story about a kid enjoying pizza, even though the vocabulary came from a nonfiction passage about geography. Checking for understanding doesn’t have to be complicated or scary. All you need is a piece of manila paper! Enjoy some wonderful examples below!
