Assessments- love them or hate them we must do them.

As I mentioned in a previous post a lot of my time in January is spent doing assessments. In our school we do formal assessments at the beginning of the school year, in January, and during the month of May. As with all teachers we also do lots of on-going and informal assessment throughout the school year. I dread the amount of time these assessments take, especially in January, when there is so much to do. What I love is the feeling I get when a student who knew no letters at the beginning of the year now knows 30 (upper and lowercase letters are counted seperately, this is for my husband who thought it was amusing that I somehow made up extra letters to get to 30) or when a student who could barely attend to the print on the page can now read. January is the time of year I start to realize how far my students have come and how far we still have to go. I am not going lie, sometimes January is the time I realize that a few students are not progressing the way I thought they were or as the other students are. This often makes me feel badly, but also motivates me to work harder to help them reach the end of kindergarten goals. It refocuses my attention on the students that need the most attention and interventions. So even though these assessments take a lot of time, I secretly (or not so secretly now) love the assessments.
Erica Gower