Monday, September 30, 2013

Spider Assessment Reasoning

I currently work with GA Pre-K in a local day care so I chose something that I could very well use in my classroom this year. Later in the school term, I will be using the theme of spiders or bugs. Since it is a pre-kindergarten class, the regular pencil and paper tests do not exist, so I had to become creative.

I had to use more completion items, then trying to do a true-false, multiple choice or traditional matching questions as the ability of a pre-kindergarten student is that they can either do something or they can't for the most part. Even asking questions can sometimes be a tricky thing with Pre-Kindergarten students.

The essay question was a little tricky in that pre-kindergarten students do not know how to traditionally write, but they can dictate to a teacher. The question I chose is fairly easy for them to dictate and they can even draw the main parts of the essay.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Spider Objectives


Pre-kindergarten class

Unit of study: Spiders
Objectives:
The student will be able to one-to-one correspond the numbers 1 -10.

The student will be able to describe the life cycle of a spider.

The student will be able to recite “Little Miss Muffet”.

The student will be able to recite “Itsy-Bitsy Spider”.

Assessments:

Given a group of plastic spiders, the student will show one-to-one correspondence to cards labeled 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 with 100% accuracy.

The student will dictate the life cycle of a spider to the teacher and then draw pictures to correlate to the dictation with 100% accuracy.

When asked, the student will recite "Little Miss Muffet" to the teacher or assistant with 100% accuracy.

When asked, the student will recite "Itsy-Bitsy Spider" to the teacher or assistant with 100% accuracy.

Summative and Formative Assessments

Formative and summative assessments are just that, assessments to assess knowledge gained by students. Summative assessments are the less used of the two kinds. It is to test knowledge in a broad sense; how a student did on a unit, chapter, or the whole year in a subject area. It is not a good assessment for daily use. Formative assessments are good for daily use if necessary. They can help a teacher know if it is time to move on or reteach. Formative is a brief assessment while summative is a long test.

 Educators can use either one of these to reflect teaching strategies. Formative assessments are good for giving at the end of a lesson to make sure that all students have grasped the intended idea or at the end of the week to help plan for the following week. Summative assessments are good for assessing overall learning.