Not my idea, but an absolute blinder courtesy of  @ListerKev (Kev’s blog) and @ASTsupportAAli who originally posted about using these for literacy here Agility – The teaching toolkit. Its working so well, I wanted to share as part of the October #blogsync 8: “Marking with Impact” … don’t get me wrong its not a panacea, but is saving me time and the novelty value means that the students are reading the comments.

Every half term, we complete a marking cycle of assessments with books marked and in conjunction with the test feedback, targets are set both by the students and the teacher. As part of the cycle, weekly homework is set and marked, a peer assessment of books takes place and we also complete a book monitoring check. Whilst doing this, I still like to write comments, but find myself repeating the same thing, so having stickers that I can just pop on the page is brilliant and saving me so much time. So far, I’ve got 5 standard comments, but as I find I need a new phrase I can just make up a few sheets and pop in my little pots ready to go. Ideally I’d have printed them onto A4 labels (not the pre cut sheets of labels) so that I can cut them to size, but we’d run out, so I’m resorting to a glue stick, which actually works quite well as they end up a bit raggedy! 

I’ve now reviewed the impact of using these and in most cases, the students have made a comment next to the sticker saying “yes miss (or similar)” or “my bad” (in one case!) and the novelty value alone, seems to have made a difference even if it just means that the students are actually reading the comments.  The idea of putting plasters on the work suggests its an “easy fix” but other images may work equally as well,  so I’m going to possibly look at other images to use with standard comments. Additionally, what I am going to try next half term, when I do this exercise is to do my normal checks but then identify what sticky plasters I would have put in and just place them in  the book for the students to self assess where they should go … that’s of course, if I (a) remember and (b) am feeling brave!

So far the comments I’ve done are: 

• Always put a date and title every lesson (here)
• Show your working out (here)
• Always use a pencil for any drawing (here)
• Fractions should be written in their simplest form (here)
• Use the worked examples to model your own work (here)
• Expand and simplify – just for @stuartlock (here)
• Remember to use BIDMAS (here)
• We spoke about this in class…. Remember?  (here) which came about, as a result of a twitter conversation with Mark Crossley  (@MrMathsTeacher), and the following is courtesy of Mark
• Set out your work clearly and logically (here)

Sheila Poolton (*waves*) sent me the following which are 65 plasters to a sheet if you are looking for something smaller:

• Show your working out (even when using a calculator) – here
• Date? Learning objective? Underlined? – here
• Always use a pencil and ruler for diagrams –