Middle School Freebies ~ Lessons, Activities and Printables

Anonymous — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 09:00:03 GMT

I’ve been getting lots of traffic on my “Freebies” page from blog followers and visitors. It occurred to me, though, that maybe not everyone has looked beyond the homepage of Lessons From The Middle. I just had a peek at the Middle School Freebies collection that I started a while back, and I noticed that [...]

Testing in Kindergarten & Freebies

Anonymous — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 01:54:00 GMT

So instead of posting my response to the Testing Time Linky in the post itself, I decided I should probably make a separate post. So here I go with what tests I give this time of year (and really all year!)

For those of you who don't know me... I teach kindergarten in already warm AZ! I have taught kinder for 7 years and I LOVE every moment of it now (I will explain that comment towards the end of this post.) I am, however, a first year employee as I switched districts this school year.

We don't give standardized tests in kindergarten in AZ (yet.) We do however give the following district tests:

1. DIBELS - If you are not familiar with DIBELS it's main goal is to assist teachers in getting students ready to read! I love DIBELS! In kindergarten it consists of 4 main areas: First Sound Fluency, Phoneme Segmentation, Letter Naming Fluency, and Non Sense Word Fluency. These tests are given at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. Students who are identified as at-risk get to go to our Literacy Lab every day where they work with a reading specialist... how lucky am I? The remainder of the students stay with me and I then target them into groups to strengthen the skills they need to gain more automaticity in! I have to say, I have only one at-risk student his year and she is actually blending words! Our school has a great support system for students who are struggling! These are the scores that hold the most importance for us in kindergarten... each student is posted in our work room by teacher and as they make growth they raise to the top! I as a teacher am responsible only for progress monitoring my at-risk kids every two weeks and my strategic every three weeks, but I tend to progress monitor most my students every four weeks.

2. IRI - I am not sure what this stands for. Again I am new so I just call it the IRI. We gave this test just a few weeks ago (and that's it so far this year.) They used sight word readers to attempt to identify which reading level each student is at. Little did I know that these sight word readers contained an abundance of environmental words such as lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! So my English Language Learners did not do so hot because they did not have the vocabulary necessary to be successful, they had the sight words though! Although these numbers are entered into the computer and uploaded to the district, I have yet receive any information on the data and can't really figure out how to get them to be helpful with my instruction.

3. Phonics Screeners - I love this assessment. It breaks phonics down into essential pieces and tests them individually - sort of a supplement to DIBELS. I am responsible to test and enter scores 3 times in a school year (with deadlines of course) but I find myself using this test to help monitor student learning on a monthly basis for students without mastery of the skills. I have made a checklist to match this assessment and so when I progress monitor my students (which is not required) I track it on this one checklist. This allows me to always have a quick snapshot of who is where reading wise and helps me again to make instructional decisions and identify small groups! I have taken this required test and eliminated some of my other tracking I am used to and made it very valuable to my students growth! Again, same as #2, although it is required, I have yet to receive any feedback on it.

4. Math Screener - This is new to my district this year. It's about 34 pages of math activities to assess what they are learning. Since it is a new test I feel that next year I will use it a lot more effectively like #3! I am trying right now to make up tests that I did not do in the correct units and it is a nightmare! Again, live and learn, next year will be better. I essentially key the information into a database that labels each student in all 34 areas as developing or proficient. I have heard this profile will become a permanent part of the student's records so I am really trying hard to test initially, give interventions, and retest so they have a fair shot to have proficiency. I don't know... just giving the test one time and not having the time to provide interventions seems unfair to the student. Again, same as #2 I would bet as far as accountability and reporting.

So that's it for kindergarten testing where I currently teach! I LOVE IT! I personally am a testing and data crazy person. I would almost rather spend my time testing and progress monitoring so that I can really fine tune my teaching to exactly what they need. I literally use the data to determine what homework kids get, what games I put in my centers, and what we do during whole and small group time.

Now the reason why I really wanted to start a linky for this topic is because of the vast difference between the two districts I have recently worked for. Believe it or not we gave our kindergartners a 60+ multiple choice test each quarter. We were required to post results in our classroom, chart growth by students, and even reward students for reaching the goal of 80%. These rewards were really cool things like dance parties and cookie decorating sessions but not so cool for those students who were not able to achieve the 80%. It broke my heart as a teacher and as a human being, my last year there I had a student who got 78% up from like 20% and she was not able to attend. Just not right! Not to mention this test was given behind offices, took all week four times a year, and by Christmas contained some state-level first grade skills. This test accounted for 50% of my bonus money each year which at one point was about $3000... so you better believe I took it way seriously! So... this got me thinking, what does it look like everywhere else (because they told us this is what the world is coming to!)

My tip for testing is to make it fun! We called our 'high-stakes' kindergarten test our tricky-pants test because they were trying to trick the pants off you! I taught a lot of test taking skills, even though many people thought it was teaching to the test because I would use some sort of test format in my instruction daily. I just strongly feel that (especially kinders) need to learn deductive reasoning they had to have experience in deductive reasoning! We can't just teach them the developmentally appropriate way and then every eight weeks sit them down and expect them to take a test. Here is a sign to have some fun with it!

OK - now to end of a more positive note. If you have not grabbed my DIBELS freebies they are great and will dramatically increase your scores through daily practice! (I updated an error in the title so you may want to re grab them.) There is one practice page for each month. I have used them two ways: in our good work folders for daily practice independently and as a class AND I have sent them home for parents to provide additional practice. Be sure to grab yours!

If you are a blogger, please link up with what you do for testing! If you are a reader, please hop on over and comment on the linky post about what you do for testing!

As always, thanks for stopping by!

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Testing in Kindergarten & Freebies