Early Literacy Assessment

Quiz themboth orally and on paper
Listen to their retellings
Have them read from the basic sight word list
Select a variety of papers that demonstrates their progress in spelling
Administer and score an attitude survey for each one
Give them the unit pretests and prepare the end-of-level posttests
Prepare a cloze passage for them
See if each one can segment a word into phonemes
Take a running record of everyones oral reading for the portfolios
Check with the reading specialist on the progress of caseload kids
Now Lets seeseems like there was something else I was supposed to do by the end of the week. Hmmmm. What was that?
Oh. Goodness me~ I nearly forgot.
Teach.
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Sometimes we get so busy preparing and administering assessments that we forget about the most important thingteaching! This can also be true of those people removed from the classroom who are connected with monitoring student performance.
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This poem is excerpted~ with publisher permission~ from Lifes Literacy Lessons~ by Steven L. Layne (Stenhouse Publishers~ 2013). The book retails for $15 and is available on the Stenhouse Web site. Stenhouse publishes professional development books and videos by teachers and for teachers. Their titles cover a range of content areas -- from literacy and mathematics to science~ social studies~ the arts~ and environmental education -- as well as a variety of topics~ including classroom management~ assessment~ and differentiation.

What do you loose sight of during the weekly shuffle? Do you ever feel too prepared?