Portfolios

Over the years, Project Based Learning has taken over more and more of my classroom day. I started with projects in the social studies and science portions of my curriculum. As time went on I was able to see where many language arts standards were addressed in the projects my students were doing. With this realization, the projects became bigger many times encompassing much of my language arts time. This has been motivating for the kids, and they enjoy the reading and writing because there is a purpose for it as it is necessary for creating the project.

One thing that I'm struggling with is assessing student learning and grades. As I moved away from set times of the day and assignments that are designated for each subject, my grade book has suffered. I used to feel like I had scores that made sense and would correlate to a letter grade, but now I don't feel that way. I'm thinking of going to something more like a portfolio assessment of work, but I don't know what that would look like or how to manage it, or get the kids to manage it.

Any thoughts, suggestions, resources?