Pre-Holiday Craziness and a Freebie

The holidays are creeping up fast.  It seems like with the holidays comes lots of school business stuff that I dread and some that I look forward to.  I have a love-hate relationship with assessments.  I dread having to stop my normal routines of daily instruction in order to assess each student.  I am thankful however that I no longer have to bubble all their data into a scantron form.  I'm also thankful that I only have 19 K-Kids to assess instead of 33.

Today I decided to do something with the data I had.  I made an Excel document and entered each kids information. I then looked at each letter and wanted to know how many kids knew each particular letter or sound.  I am now going to focus on the letters that scored less than 80%.  Here are my results.

• Upper Case Letters that need more attention: D, D, G, I
• Lower Case Letter that need more attention: d, a, n, j, l, h, e, k, g, b, q, i
• Sounds that need more attention: ALL with the exception of /S/.  Although I have many kids that know 80% of their sounds very few sounds were mastered by the entire class.  

Here is a snapshot of what it looks like

To make my life of assessment a little easier, I have created an assessment binder with a section for each K-Kid and an assessment toolbox.  My toolbox is basically a pencil box with all the manipulatives I need.  The binder has a student roster in the front where I have assigned each student a class number.  The divider pages are numbered.  It makes it easy for me to flip through to their page, find their recording sheets and record their data.  I have been using this method for about 5 years now and it is perfect.  I never lose anything and I always have their current data at my fingertips.

At this time we don't have a current benchmark assessment.  So a group of us looked at our report card and then took what we could from our old benchmarks and cut and pasted it to make an assessment recording sheet  The OCD person in me hates how choppy it looks, but, I have to let it go.  I know that eventually we will have one that looks pretty.

This year I will be using our Phonics Screener to assess the letter and sound identification.  Why reinvent the wheel.  I have also found easy ways around individual assessments by assessing a few kids at a time using divider screens from Really Good Stuff.  Depending on the task, I am able to assess 4-6 kids at a time.

Here is what the academics of our report card looks like.

Here is something I shared last year.
Roll the die and write the letter you roll in the correct column.  I think this will be a perfect addition to tomorrow's centers while I finish assessments. Click the picure below to download your FREE copy.