Keeping Track of Pencils with The Great Pencil Challenge

I wanted to share some updates to The Great Pencil Challenge (the link will take you to the original post on this free management system).

My students and I LOVE this challenge and it has helped us keep track of our pencils with great success…but we started late in the year and now I’d like to prepare for a new school year, with all the necessary items ready to go.

So I’ve updated The Great Pencil Challenge posters with a bit of a different look, along with some other goodies. This free file features the following signs:

I display our signs on the whiteboard so we can calculate the statistics by representing the fraction, decimal, and percent…for the rare occasions when we don’t have a 100% rate!

In addition to the display signs, this resource also features a record sheet (actually, two! One with numbers, one without). My students know that I always say “everything you do in class counts towards a grade”…but this can be hard to show with our pencil challenge. For me, I do want record of it because I do like to keep track of their responsibility.

ETA: I no longer use this tracking sheet. I now keep track of my students’ pencil management in my checklist book, under the management tab. You can read more about this here: Keeping Track of Everything with Checklists.

I use a Pencil Check sheet from my Instant Checklists resource, which saves me precious time in writing my students’ names (I just have to type them one time and all checklists are ready to print):