Author: JESSUP BORRA

Tic-Tac-Toe Project (Culmination of a 9th grade LA unit on Short Stories)
Directions: Choose three tasks below. Your choices must be in a row. Rows may be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. Circle or highlight your choices.

Write a letter from one character in your chosen story to another character from the same story. The letter should be one page in length and should be grammatically correct. It should convey the voice (personality) of your character. The letter should also contain important plot details from the story.	Choose an artifact that appeared or might have appeared in your short story. Explain what the artifact is and why it is important to the story. Your artifact should be meaningful to the plot, theme, or characters. Your explanation should take the form of a 5-7 sentence paragraph, complete with a topic sentence.	Write a script for one incident in your chosen short story. The script should contain dialogue between two or more characters. In addition to dialogue, include stage directions such as the character’s movements, reactions, and tone of voice. You should also describe details like where your scene takes place, the costumes characters would wear, lighting, and music.
Make a nature collage that depicts elements found within the setting of your chosen story. Using photos, artifacts, and/or natural elements like leaves and grass, create a visual of your story’s setting – whether it be jungle or urban. Please omit anything smelly or rotten!	Write a diary entry that is one page in length and should be grammatically correct. It should convey the voice (personality) of your character and pay particular attention the your character’s inner thoughts and feelings. The diary entry should contain important plot details from the story.	Create a comic strip that depicts one incident from your short story. The strip should contain at least 5-7 panels. Include dialogue and/or captions for each panel.
Compose a song with three stanzas and one chorus. The song should capture the mood of the story, as well as convey important plot details.	Create an acrostic poem. Your acrostic may be one word or several, but it must have a minimum of ten letters. Choose your words carefully, and ensure that they relate to your short story in a meaningful way.	Write an article in newspaper or magazine format that describes a notable event from your story. The article should be written from an objective reporter’s perspective. You need to include at least one quote from a character, as well as an image (with caption) to go along with your article.

Jessup Borra, 2009

About the Tic-Tac-Toe Project:

This project gives students freedom to choose which tasks they will complete to show content mastery.
Students must choose three in a row, just like Tic-Tac-Toe.
The bottom horizontal row contains the three easiest tasks, while the top horizontal row contains the most challenging tasks. You could always suggest that a certain student go for the bottom row or the top row, depending on their ability level.
There are nine possible choices—each project corresponds with a different learning style.

Other Alternative Assessment Ideas:

Physical Demonstration: To express academic concepts without speech, students can point or use other gestures. They can also be asked to perform hands-on tasks or to act out vocabulary, concepts, or events. As a comprehension check in a unit on Native Americans, for example, teachers can ask students to respond with thumbs up, thumbs down, or other nonverbal signs to true or false statements or to indicate whether the teacher has grouped illustrations (of homes, food, environment, clothing, etc.) under the correct tribe name. The teacher can use a checklist to record student responses over time.
Pictorial Products: To elicit content knowledge without requiring students to speak or write, teachers can ask students to produce and manipulate drawings, dioramas, models, graphs, and charts. When studying Colonial America, for example, teachers can give students a map of the colonies and labels with the names of the colonies. Students can then attempt to place the labels in the appropriate locations. This labeling activity can be used across the curriculum with diagrams, webs, and illustrations.
K-W-L Charts: Many teachers have success using K-W-L charts (what I know/what I want to know/what I've learned) to begin and end a unit of study, particularly in social studies and science. Before the unit, this strategy enables teachers to gain an awareness of students' background knowledge and interests. Afterward, it helps teachers assess the content material learned.
Oral Performances or Presentations: Performance-based assessments include interviews, oral reports, role plays, describing, explaining, summarizing, retelling, paraphrasing stories or text material, and so on.
Oral and Written Products: Some of the oral and written products useful for assessing ESL students' progress are content area thinking and learning logs, reading response logs, writing assignments (both structured and creative), dialogue journals, and audio or video cassettes.
Portfolios: Portfolios are used to collect samples of student work over time to track student development. Tierney, Carter, and Desai (1991) suggest that, among other things, teachers do the following: maintain anecdotal records from their reviews of portfolios and from regularly scheduled conferences with students about the work in their portfolios; keep checklists that link portfolio work with criteria that they consider integral to the type of work being collected; and devise continua of descriptors to plot student achievement. Whatever methods teachers choose, they should reflect with students on their work, to develop students' ability to critique their own progress.

Source: “Practical Ideas on Alternative Assessment for ESL Students”
Author: Jo-Ellen Tannenbaum

Tic-Tac-Toe Project (7th Grade Math/Unit 1)
Directions: Choose three tasks below. Your choices must be in a row. Rows may be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal. Circle or highlight your choices.

Write a short story about a person whose finances are “in the red.” Perhaps you might write about how they came to be in that situation, or how they intend to get out of it!	You be the teacher: create a worksheet for your classmates to help them practice finding the absolute value of a number. Your worksheet should include a definition of “absolute value” and at least ten practice problems.	Create a poster for our math classroom that explains the Distributive Property process. Include step-by-step directions, as well as 2-3 examples of the process.
Using pictures from magazines or the internet, create an artistic collage of integers and rational numbers.	Your substitute teacher tells the class that two negative numbers ALWAYS make a positive. Write a paragraph that states whether you agree or disagree with him.	Compare and contrast a terminating decimal with a repeating decimal.
Use a road map or an online resource like Google Maps to chart the distance between your house and John Evans Middle School.	Convert each of the following fractions to their equivalent decimals and percentages: / 3/4, 1/8, 9/10 / For example: / 1/2 = .50 = 50%	Using complete sentences, describe the strategy you used to find the sum of the following expression: / -3 + -8 =

For example:
I (agree or disagree) with the statement that two negatives always make a positive. I believe this because ________________.

For example:
The strategy I used for finding the sum of –3 + -8 = is ________.
I like this strategy because ___________.

Jessup Borra, 2013