Reading for 4/20 (Dude)

Classroom-Based Assessment

I am a big fan of making my own tests. Although I like to borrow and steal material and questions from other places, I find that most tests do not meet my needs (and in turn my students').
Washback is difficult to achieve. I hate providing extensive comments on my students' writing, mainly because of the time factor, but it is also only a handful of students who even want or utilize extensive feedback. I usually use a rubric or checklist for grading, and then 3-4 comments with a few grammatical corrections if they happen repeatedly. I've had to go over punctuation for quoting and integrating sources with my students quite a bit this semester. I am surprised that this is a skill that is lacking. We see it used in print so often. Okay, I see it in print so often. I have a hard time remembering how old I am (the show thirty-something finally makes sense). I played a video clip from Letterman with former govenor Rod Legovitch, and only a couple of students knew who Legovitch was, and not many more knew who Letterman was. Ugh.
As I mentioned before about my placement in the kindergarten room, I got to administer an end of unit test 1:1 with two students. I think it would be extremely helpful for classroom teachers to have the opportunity to do this, although rather time consuming. But it was extremely clear to me what each of them still needed to work on. And it eliminated some external factors that could skew results, such as a student just not hearing the question, or thinking something else was being asked.

I just wanted to alert you to two websites I found interesting and useful, particularly for younger students.

http://www.storylineonline.net/ - this one has recordings of famous people reading popular children's stories. Last week I observed the students engrossed with Sean Austin (go Goonies)reading A Bad Case of Stripes. I developed a super fun lesson plan using that book that I used last year.

http://www.tinyd.net/sseandb.html - and this is a link to a bunch of Sesame Street song lyrics. I can never remember the words (la-de-da-de-dum).