Assessment Fun

Is constant assessment taking over your life and stressing you out? There are many different types of assessments teachers in pre-k and kindergarten must administer to their students throughout the school year. It is important that you keep your testing time down to a minimum so you can actually teach what you’re supposed to be testing.

I used to spend countless hours over the course of days and weeks sitting in a corner of my classroom or hallway testing. Some years I designated the last 45 minutes of class each day for a week or more as “testing time” and other years we did it first thing in the mornings. What I discovered about this approach to testing was that it was “nickel and diming” my students and I hated it. They were missing out on one portion of learning each day for several days, which wasn’t fair to them.

When our new principal arrived he announced that each teacher would receive a substitute for one or two days each quarter depending on grade level and number of students. While the sub was there we were to test our hearts out and get it all out of the way; what a difference it made to do all of our testing in one fell swoop! When the budget crunch hit our district and we could no longer afford substitutes we decided to stick with this approach and used our assistant instead. On Monday our shared assistant would take one class all day while the teacher of that class tested and the other teacher was on her own, the following day we would switch. It was only a minor inconvenience in exchange for big returns.

Another teacher took this idea a step further and turned her testing day into a party day! She recruited a few volunteers and had them each prepare and man a station in her classroom on testing day. The theme was “Clifford the Big Red Dog” and each station had a different activity that related to the theme of Clifford. At each table they had an activity to complete like making edible dog biscuit treats, graphing if they liked the dog biscuits, reading Clifford books, making a Clifford face and writing a sentence about it. At the end of the day when the teacher was finished with testing she came back into the classroom to view the results of their fun day. What a great idea!