Daily Goals with Weekly Deadlines - Algebra 1 style

This week I implemented the first week of "Daily Goals with Weekly deadlines" for my Algebra 1 students.  I've been doing that with my Math Analysis kiddos for the last 3 weeks (I ALWAYS trial things with my Honors students before trying them with CP).

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

I was afraid that students would procrastinate and not meet the daily goals because they knew they could still get it signed off later.  I didn't really see a big issue with that.  Most students were still on target every day, and I still had a few students working ahead of schedule.

My goal was to decrease a little stress off of the students and have them focus on their learning and less on rushing through assignments to "get their points".  I really hate seeing "crap" - assignments that are just rushed through or, even worse, just have junk written down that students hope I won't notice if I look over it too quickly.

It was exciting to see students still complete assignments from earlier in the week that they had missed or skipped.  In the past, they would have just left them undone.  Now their goal was to finish their whole chart by the end of the week.

Here are some student comments (student grammar and phrasing left intact):

• It makes me feel better cause then if i missed a problem then i could ask for help if i didn't understand something the next day then i could fix it.. 
• Home work being signed off like this every week is a good learning process. It helps so much knowing that you're given a tiny piece of paper and you're given assignments but you have the whole week too work at you're own pace and whatever you get done, you accomplish. The main thing for me about the way Ms. Kirch checks off hw is that i'm given all week and i can work at my own pace. 
• i feel that is kinda good because it helps me out to finish them even though they are marked red so yeah it's pretty good.
• i like the way it's being signed off.  it's little chaotic that we're all doing our own thing but i feel like it lets students be comfortable doing their own thing.
• Good; it doesn't make a difference because i always do my homework and it is better than the other one because you can get red signatures whenever 
• i like the new way we're doing because the other way we did it was kinda hard for me because one i day i would forget to do the wsq...but after that we can make it up
• i thinks its great i like it way better than old way to do the wsq chart. you still can turn in the hw late and not get a hw card .
• Honestly, I don't really care about how we get our charts signed off, because I always do my work no matter what. As long as i get all blue signatures, I'm good! Maybe other students like this new way of getting signed off, but my opinion didn't really change.  
• I like the new way homework is being signed off.  It gives the student that chance to go back and do the homework and not get an empty box.  It is better to have a red signature than none because it is worth points.  The students now realize that they get the chance to actually do their homework and get a red signature rather than get a homework card.