Read and Write 180-Day 4

Online assessments are the best thing since sliced bread!!!!! 🙂 Today my 6th graders took a reading baseline assessment online which will help to guide my instruction for each student. Not only did it grade it for me RIGHT THEN (which is a big plus!!), but it broke it down so that I know what they need help on! Now I know who needs help with understanding plot, drawing conclusions, main idea, etc. OMG! This is so wonderful!!!!! I might not like everything about our reading program (I don’t think I’ll ever really like everything about any one reading program), but this is WONDERFUL!!!! It was so worth toting all of those laptops from the high school to the elementary building, turning on all 24, and entering the wireless access code on ALL 24. Oh, wait-not all 24 worked-I think I had about 19 that worked. BUT-it worked out, and now I have some great reading data on all of my students! 🙂 I feel like doing the happy dance!!!

Here’s the website where we did the baseline assessment:

https://www.pearsonsuccessnet.com/snpapp/login/login.jsp

 

 Anne got on my laptop to play with http://www.wordle.net/

My project for the rest of this week will be to create an assessment web for each student so that I can record all of the data from the assessments that we are doing this week, information from their reading survey they completed, info from the parent surveys I sent home, etc…. INSTRUCTION WILL BEGIN NEXT WEEK!!!!!

I felt sorry for the kids today because the test was soooo long, and they had to sit for so long. I’ll make it up to them somehow later this week.

Yesterday I forgot to show you a picture of the beautiful sunflower that one of my students brought me. It’s so pretty!

I also sent home a parent survey yesterday for my parents to fill out about their child. This will show me what the parents have to say about their child’s interests, abilities, etc. I also asked them to let me know what they want their child to be able to accomplish this year. This will become part of that assessment web that I mentioned earlier. Here is the parent survey if you want to look at it:

parent-reading-interview word

parent-reading-interview pdf

I did not create these on my own. I took the idea from Beth Newingham and Kenecia Williams who are Scholastic blog authors. I just modified it to meet my needs. Here is the link to Beth’s blog post about her reading workshop and assessments.

http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2009/11/assessment-reading-workshop.html

The only other thing we really did today after the reading assessment was to add a couple of things to the technology section of our IPOD binder. I had them put their username and password for the online assessment website (Pearson Success) in this section as well as the website address. They also wrote down wordle.net since we learned how to make word clouds last week. I tried to let them make the word clouds today on the laptops, but the java program was not new enough to allow it! 😦 I’ll have to work on that! 🙂

One of my students brought a wordle in that she created and printed at home. So cute!

 See the BIG letters-stands for “People I Know”!

An exciting part of our day was when we found a couple of friends-Mrs. Scorpion and her baby:

We gave them a proper burial-with the bottom of a shoe. 🙂