assessment

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assessment
By Julianne

I teach first grade in a central city school with a large hispanic population. We do formal assessments in reading and math, informal assessments in everything else. For writing assessment I look at a number of sources.
First, our students write in journals several times a week. Looking back at their earlier writing compared to what they are able to do now gives me a good idea of what they are learning and what they still need to pick up. We start journaling by writing about our families. Most of the ESL students will be able to write a name under the pictures they draw of their parents, siblings,

etc. We move on to drawing pictures of our friends, our homes, what we want for Christmas, anything they are interested in. They write a word or two at first, more by this time of year. Most of my first year ESL students can write an entire simple sentence now. So I start looking to see that they start the sentences with a capital letter, end them with a period. I look for word endings, as this is a place where ESL students sometimes have difficulty.

Another area where you can assess writing is when you do shared or interactive writing activities with your group. (Do you do either of these activities?) Students are asked to share the pen with the teacher. As you ask each student to add a letter, a word or a phrase to a group composition, note if they are able to place the word correctly on the lines of the paper. Are they able to sound out the word to know which letters to write? Can they assess which word or letter they should write next? Can they use resources in the room to help them find the words they want when they write? I had a great example of this happen the other day. We were writing just before Thanksgiving about what we liked to eat. The kids were drawing foods and labeling them. I had pointed out different food words on our bulletin boards and charts around the room. But when the kids began to write they quickly grabbed the "menu" from our pretend restaurant! They knew it had foods listed on it and it made a great resource. I hadn't even thought to point it out.

Asking your ESL students to stretch a single word into an entire sentence is a good way to assess their ability to write. If they write "apples" when you ask them what they like to eat, ask them to add "I like to eat..." to make an entire sentence. Most of them may surprise you.

Good luck with this group. I love seeing the dramatic changes in them over the year.