TPE 2: Assessing Student LearningEarly Literacy Unit: Poetry
This poetry unit for 1st and 2nd grade students affords me many opportunities for formal and informal assessment. The poetry unit spans one week and can be repeated with different poems and skills throughout the year. On nearly every day of this unit, there is a student product that can be assessed. The first day is a simple introduction to a poem. On day 2, the vocabulary day, the students themselves point out the difficult vocabulary in the poem. This serves as an informal formative assessment concerning the breadth of their vocabulary. The skill search day, day 3, acts as both a skill review for the students and as a skill assessment for me. On their copy of the poem, they highlight all the words with, let's say, the long 'i' sound. They then go on a word hunt and find long 'i' words in the classroom. I can look at their marked poems and the words they found in the room for information about student progress. Day 4, orally in class, I gather formative information about the student's grasp of print concepts, concepts like capitalization, punctuation, and poem structure. Looking at the student poem artwork from day 5 will let me assess their reading comprehension. At any point during this unit, I can go back and reteach a skill, I can extend the allotted lesson time in response to the needs of the moment. At the end of the week, I use a rubric to monitor and record each student's progress. This poetry unit gives students chances for practice and review literary skills with an authentic text and gives me opportunities measure student progress carefully and frequently. |