Castagnozzi_Journal+09+3

Maria Castagnozzi Assessment 3

I've noticed my teacher doesn’t do a lot of assessment by formal tests and quizzes, so when I do go I try extra hard to see if she has any assessments taking place that are more in forms of fun worksheets for the students. Since I’m in first grade I see my teacher doing a lot of reading, asking questions, and doing some worksheets after the follow up the assignment. The other day I was working with a small group of about five students and we were going to be reading a story. We first looked at the front cover and skimmed the pictures in the story to make some predictions about what they thought the book was going to be about. We went around and everyone told their predictions. This could be classified as a pre- assessment because I assessed how the students made predictions. I asked myself if they were telling me accurate prediction to see if they needed my guidance or not, and to see if they were making accurate predictions given the picture clues. After we came up with some creative ideas we started reading the story, one by one, round-robin-style.. After we read the story I went around the group and asked the students to give me a summary of the events and some facts about what they just read. Various students told me some summaries, some more in-depth than others. I asked them what parts of the story they liked and didn’t like. My teacher told me to ask these questions so not only could the children tell me if they understood the story or not, but also to get them to start learning how to retell stories, including characters names and such. I wanted them to pick out their favorite parts of the story and be able to explain why they liked that part, or who they liked the best and why. This helps students to avoid giving the one word answer and helps them to clarify and expand their answers and explanations. After we got a good understanding of the story we then moved on to the worksheet my teacher told me to hand out to the students. It was a fill in the blanks worksheet. She told me they didn’t have that much experience with fill in the blanks so they might have trouble with it. I handed out a worksheet to each student with a pair of scissors. The students had to cut out every word in the word bank. They then had to figure out which word fit in each space and when they found the right word they had to glue the word onto the space. I think this assessment would be a fill in the blank test because the children were figuring parts of the story themselves by reading the text and figuring out which word fits best. I’m not too sure if this was graded like a test but it was used as an activity to assess the students. This helped the teacher see whether or not the students understood the story, and also how their skills were in taking a word and fitting it into a spot in a sentence to put it together and for it to make sense. I feel as though this was a good assessment. It was very fair for the students because before they took the fill-in-the-blank “test” we first went over the book before we read, making predictions, then we read the story, and then we retold and went over the story after we read it. This allowed the students many opportunities to understand what the story was about. That helped the students complete the fill-in-the-blank worksheet. They also got to refer back to the book for help with the sentences so I do believe this was a fair assessment. Section 3