I love getting students involved in assessments and making goals. It makes it less scary and more motivating for all!
Another motivator and piece of ownership is data binders for math facts. Students had to get a 95% or higher at the time (this was my first time trying data folders). This upcoming year, I will ask students to get a 100% to move on. I'm so mean, right? haha!
I am still working on which assessments I want to use in my classroom this upcoming fall, and much of that will depend on what grade I teach. I just know, I am going make myself the goal of testing to make sure my students have a balanced literacy experience (comprehension, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and phonological awareness). I plan on testing in these areas no matter what grade I teach, but they will be modified accordingly (i.e. I will not be testing 6th graders letter identification). You may be wondering why I would test phonics or phonological awareness even with 4th graders. I was working with a student over the last semester, and had an eye opening experience when the 4th grader I was working with was having issues with dipthongs, a few blends, and even some diagraphs. I was amazed that he did not know these skills, so I knew with a basic phonics assessments throughout the school year I can make sure my students know these basic foundational skills. My goal is to test in the beginning of the year, and depending on scores test some more frequently and others may not be tested again or just 3x a year. Hopefully I'll be able to update you all on what assessments I decide and how they work in my classroom!
A few things I do know is that I plan on testing fluency weekly and running records once a month. These are skills my former 2nd and 3rd graders struggled with and I did not test often enough. I used to test running records 3x a year, and moved students up to new levels without the data to back it up! YIKES! Now, I plan on testing 1-2 students a day and by the end of the month each student will have an updated score. This will help when they are self selecting books, deciding interventions, and guiding my differentiated instruction.
As I sat here, hoping to publish this post soon...I thought to myself "What would make this easier for me [and my readers] and what will help me actually accomplish this goal?" The answer was a recording sheet. Something I can keep at the front of my data binder or my lesson plan binder. So I stopped writing the post at the time, and went to create a recording sheet bundle for all of your ELA assessments. Now, because I know the struggle of keeping so on top of so many things...I am setting the price of this product as F-R-E-E! That way, you won't have any issues keeping track of who is left to give the fluency assessment or who is on my agenda for running records today?
Data Recording Sheets {FREEBIE}
Now, my next professional goal is individual interventions. I feel like this is still something I am not very good at deciding which intervention is best. So now that I have the data thing organized, my hopes is to do the RIGHT THING with this data. What is the point of having the data if you don't do anything with it, right? My first step is to look more into websites like:
Feel free to comment with other intervention websites that are free for myself and other readers to try. My hopes are that using some of these great online resources, I can get a good start on finding the right interventions for struggling students. Maybe one day, I'll be posting my own interventions on my TPT Store. Until then...
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