Back to School with ESGI

Back to School time means finding out all about your new little ones. The best way for me to do this is with the help of ESGI. This amazing online software tool allows me to quickly asses my students and find out exactly what they know or rather what they don't know.

ESGI comes with pre-made assessments, or you can make your own.  When our students arrived on the first day, they were placed into six groups: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.  Those six groups were then divided into 3 classrooms.  For example I had the red and yellow group to start with. 

For the next three days, each teacher completed the same activities with the students they had while our assistants helped to assess the students that were in our rooms.  During these three days,  the 6 groups were rotated and shuffled.  For example, at one time I had the green and purple, but later I had the red and purple, then the orange and blue groups.  We had three rotations a day, making it so each teacher saw every group at least twice, but most groups 3 times.

On the third day we printed out the assessment scores and ranked our students low, low/medium, medium, medium/high and high.  Next we pulled out students who appeared to be challenging students, or students who we could see should not be placed together in the same classroom.  We divided these students among the three of us teachers first. Then we started our selection process each making sure we had equal numbers of boys and girls in all academic categories. as well as trying to balance out the Non-ELL students.  Our school is a majority of ELL students.

We then reviewed our classes, made any last minute changes before we were ready for our mock class day.  Friday, was our mock class day.  After we took attendance our students were shuffled to what we hoped to be our permanent classes.  We met at lunch to discuss any changes we might need to make.  This year we decided they are all tired, we are tired and it is going to be a challenging year at the start.  At the end of the day every student went home with a letter and a sticker telling their parents who their teacher would be, beginning the following week.

I can't imagine doing the beginning of the year any other way.  In the past the office manager just placed kids on our roster and maybe you'd get lucky with who was in your room and maybe you'd be that teacher who somehow got every kid who had been diagnosed with ADHD and who had never been read to or held a crayon.  This truly helps to sort those students out and make the classes even academically and behaviorally. 

Using ESGI gives us the jump start to be able to tell parents after the first week of school this is where your child is academically and where they need to be.  It has so many great features like the ability to print flashcards and name tags and the parent letters in Spanish are amazing.  We even attach those to our report cards.

ESGI is forever adding new features and their customer service is AMAZING.  Literally on the first day of school minutes before school started I was on the phone with them trying to add a new student and their online support patiently walked me through the process. 

It saves so much time  Try the trial, show the data to your admin or the powers that be, I showed it to our assistant superintendent and I am so thankful she believed in me and so are the other kindergarten teachers n our district.

If you want to try ESGI for FREE for 60 days  Sign-up before September 30th and

1. Save $40 on the purchase of a license when a promo code is used to start trial
2. New trial users will be entered into a raffle to win one of ten $50 Amazon gift cards
3. New trial users will be entered to win one Grand Prize of a $500 Amazon gift card