Advanced Organizers & Nonlinguistic Representation

This week's chapters and discussions brought out a few fun ideas that I would like to incorporate into the upcoming school year.  Our team is about half way through "creating" a reading/language arts curriculum based off of the new Common Core standards and about to start thinking about what we want our assessments to look like.  There is a big interest to do more project-based assessments because it results in  a much higher interest level and in turn, produces a much better product.  However, with testing being such  a highly regarded measure of comprehension and understanding, we will have to included standard assessments simply to give the students practice at completing them.  As I was reading through the chapters and thinking about some answers to the group response questions, I got some really fun ideas for assessment options.  I would really like to find an opportunity for our students to create a board game, produce a digital summary (digital storytelling) of a topic or story, and even make a scrapbook.

Using advanced organizers is also something that I know I use, but feel that I will be making a more concerted effort to focus on and use on purpose.  I wasn't aware of the wide variety of materials that were seen as, and can be used as, an organizer.  There are a lot of ways to edit and alter already created materials to fit the purpose of an organizer, and would produce a much stronger lesson and understanding by the student(s).