Happy Throwback Thursday!
Thank you Cara at The First Grade Parade for hosting!
My plane literally touched down about a hour ago...and I am back from visiting my hometown of Dayton, Ohio. It was literally a throwback WEEK! Lots of family business to attend to as my parents are growing older, but it was a special time to spend with my wonderful family :)
If you follow me on Instagram, you already know what I've been up to. Otherwise, it will have to wait for another post (after I unpack)!
My Throwback blogpost is a topic that seems to be always on my mind:
Assessments
As a special educator, I feel like the more information I have on my students' learning, the better! I administer a variety of informal assessments pretty much all year 'round. Although we are always looking for mastery, I'm keeping an especially close eye for growth. ANY growth. This data helps me make decisions on where to continue to push my lil' friends!
I recently just revised my "Time for School" (and then continue all school year!) Activity Pack which is full of engaging hands-on materials designed for performance assessments and establishing baselines:
and my TBT post has an additional phonics checklist assessment freebie included!
Enjoy!
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Superhero Assessments!
Whew! Made it to the 3-day weekend!
This past week was OFF. THE. CHAIN.
It was our interim assessment week, which also happened to fall in our NWEA testing window AND the IEP quarterly progress reports. And the flu, again :(
Looking back, gathering ALL the data at one time provided a thorough snapshot of student progress. But tell that to a six year-old who is sitting through assessment number SEVEN!
I provide testing accommodations for about a dozen students. These include verbatim reading, scribe, extended time, etc. Those are the official accommodations. The "off the record" accommodations are high 5's, brain breaks after every 5 completed problems, earning "bellytime" on my office floor, using the "special testing pencil," etc. Even with all those extras, my students were just not having it!
Here's what I resorted to on Friday:
"The superheroes are watching you rock the assessment!"
I have no shame. Whatever works!
Soon, it became:
The Hulk is taking a closer look
as my students "show what they know!"
And, this was all of us afterwards:
Tired
Because my students were barely even able to pick up a pencil by the end of the week (or maybe that was just me!), I created these cards to do a simple phonics checklist assessment:
Sorry they are sideways!
There are 10 cards for the following: CVCe, CVVC, and CCVC.
(I also added CVC to the set, just in case).
The students read the appropriate set
& I tracked progress using this:
It gave me a quick check of my students' mastery and/or a baseline of where we are right now. I tuck this page in their file and then assess in a designated amount of time (I aim for monthly) to check progress.
If you would like to download this set of cards and tracking page,
Have a super Saturday!
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