Dyana+_Journal+3

Dyana Brown Assessment Journal #3 Today, the students were given a morning worksheet that was focused on practicing word families. The students did not have a hard time filling in the blanks using a word bank of words provided that the teacher wanted them to use; but, they had the most difficulty will identifying and thinking of their own words that could belong in another word’s word family. Today was also the “100th Day” of school in the year of 2009 for the first graders. The teacher had planned the entire day around the “100 Days” theme. So, after reading a book about the 100 days of school on the carpet, the teacher explained to the students the different activities that she created for them. Each of these activities fall under the assessment: fill-in-the-blank. The first was for the students to fill in 100 words that they could find around the room. They could find these words on the word wall, the content bulletin board, in their spelling books, or anywhere else that they could think of. The next activity was “100” math problems, though there were really only 40 problems. Since the children are working on subtraction, each page had subtraction of a different number. For instance, the first page was subtracting zero; the second page was subtracting one; and the last page was subtracting two. The final assessment that the teacher created was that the students had to read 100 books. The teacher explained this in a clever way so that the students would figure out that they each only had to read 5 books in order to make 100 together as a class. The teacher explained this by asking the students to count off how many books they should read in order to read 100 together. As a class, and with the teacher’s help, the students eventually figured that they only needed the five books to reach 100. The teacher demonstrated this by having each student stand up as the class counted by 5’s until they reached 100. After explaining the directions, the students went to work, searching for the different words around the room and completing the “100” math problems. They would probably not get to reading 100 books until after lunch. While the students worked on their words, I had the opportunity to work with a few students to help them on their morning worksheet about the word families. For some reason, more than half of the class did not know what was being asked of them for this section of the worksheet. They were given a word and then asked to come up with two more words that belonged to the listed word’s word family. For instance, they were given the word, “log” and had to find two more words that had an “og” in the word. I think that the assessment was a logical way of evaluating their knowledge and was reasonable the way it was formatted. For instance, the worksheet literally provided the words for the students that the teacher used. So, they had to comprehend what they were taught and then they had to apply the concepts. They all seemed to have trouble applying the concept until I re-explained the directions for this section to them. Also, for the math assessment, some students mistakenly added the entire worksheet rather than subtracting. So, I think the important message from this day was to make sure that the directions are clearer and explained in a more thorough manner. The assessments would have been more effective in assessing the students’ knowledge if the directions were clearer because after working with them, I knew that they knew the information; they just did not realize what was being asked and expected of them.