Assessment is Key!

Assessment is Key!

Let's assume that you are a grade school teacher just beginning the school year and you now have 15 or 20 or more children sitting in front of you in the second week of school.   You have had an opportunity to familiarize yourself with them and they with  you. You come to realize that more than a small handful of the students did next to nothing during the months that schools were closed and another group of students who were taught extremely well by their parents and are waiting to continue their progress.  You have spent sleepless nights all week-end trying to decide where you would start to teach such a disparate group of students.  So let me tell you that I had a Grade 6 class once where the tested reading ability of my students went from barely Grades 2 (the days before so much testing and I. E. P.'s) to Grade 12.  That's right. I had students at every level of reading ability and it was NOT a small class and I had to some how teach them all.  So what did I do? Those were the days when I was still developing as a professional, but I remember one of the things I did with them was read books aloud. I remember reading them The Yearling by Marjorie Kennan Rawlings and they loved it so much that you could hear a pin drop the last day of the book and they clapped when I finished.  But think of all the things  you could do with small groups  of students around that book.  I read the book because it was a Newberry Award winning book, so the good readers could pick other books nominated in more recent years and then write or deliver book reports on their reading and compare the books in terms of why they might have won awards like The Yearling.  You could have some of the poorer readers find the movie of the book and watch it and then pretend that they were interviewing the lead actors and actresses and make a video of their interviews, skills that most kids have now because of TikTok.  You could have some of the kids doing a report on raising horses, and another on the differences between living in the city and living in the country. Those are just for starters.  Then, another thing I did the year was do a unit on banking and each child had an imaginary bank account and they did jobs around the classroom and got paid for their services and the money deposited to their accounts.  Then they formed themselves into groups and they used their money to organize booths for a fun-fair which we ran in the spring and each group ran their booths like businesses and had to report on profit and loss after the event. At Hallowe'en, they made stuffed dummies using clothes they brought from home and stuffed with paper and then the dummies were all over the school. We even had a picture in the local paper  with the kids grouped around their dummies out in the front of the school. They were so realistic, the principal was heard saying Excuse Me one time he walked in front of one of the dummies and then he had a great laugh over what he had done. My point with all of this is that there are hard and soft skills that we teach in school and although kids come from different environments and might have different learning abilities, there are things they ALL love to do and can enjoy that brings them to the plate where learning takes place and skills are developed.  Don't see the next weeks as challenges that you cannot overcome but rather opportunities to explore new ways of learning and extending the abilities of your students, regardless of how they spent the last six months.  Soon enough, they'll all be sailing and making great progress.