Assessment in the Primary Grades

I’m linking up with Shelly over at Teaching in the Early Years to talk about assessment. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I like this topic. I love hearing about and creating new ideas for how best to assess my students. It’s been a long rode, that’s for sure! Assessment is sort of like a frenemy (friend and enemy) that you better get along with, but is also a huge headache sometimes! It can totally be overwhelming but it is necessary. The trick is to use that assessment to your advantage and not just as an afterthought to cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Not that that is easy! And by the way, I’m totally preaching about what I do in an ideal situations if I was a super teacher, not necessarily what I always actually do. Someday I will be a perfect teacher, right? 🙂

Okay, so here goes! This post is going to be a smorgasboard of different assessment tools I’ve posted about in the past.

First up is my guided reading “snapshot”. I use these to communicate with parents about students’ progress with reading. You can read more about how I use these in great detail here. (While your there you can download these for FREE).

I made a similar snapshot for addition. I’m eventually going to make them for other math standards too. It’s on my summer to-do list! You can get that freebie by clicking on the picture.

I use these to assess students writing journals.

and here’s a checklist of those skills:

for the class

and for individual students (I would put dates at the top).

Click here to get those.

Here’s a sample of a writing rubric I would use at the end of the year for a more formal assessment.

If you like that rubric, I have a ginormous pack of writing rubrics.

and a huge pack of reading response rubrics. This pack has the reading response prompt pages and the rubrics. This pack is totally common core aligned!