Beginning of the Year Assessments

Whew!  What a week.

This past week I had car duty and conferences.  Now conferences are just on Monday, for everybody else.  But in kindergarten, we like be overachievers.  Instead of just meeting with the parents of our struggling students, we meet with every family.  So in addition to morning and afternoon car duty, where it felt like I was in a sauna, I met with 4-5 parents each afternoon.

This made for an extremely loong week.

But I did get some things accomplished!

The other kindergarten teachers I were busy giving our beginning of the year assessment.  It gave us some useful information to talk with our parents about during our conferences.

So I worked with a few kids each day to complete them all in the week's time.

The first page assesses:

• Name writing
• Identifying colors (I color the boxes in before giving the assessment with the correct color crayon)
• Identifying Shapes - I write down exactly what the student calls each shape

 

The second page assesses:

• Rote counting
• Number identification 1-20
• Writing numbers to 10
• One-to-one correspondence (I usually put little stickers in the box before copying everyone's assessment, but I forgot, so I had to draw 10 circles on each assessment)

The third page assesses:

• Identifying uppercase letters
• Identifying lowercase letters
• Identifying letter sounds

The fourth page assesses:

• Identifying the letters in their name
• Fine Motor Skills - holding a pencil, correctly using scissors, cutting skills, and coloring skills (I got in a hurry and didn't quite finish this one)
• Extra Notes - this is where I make notes about any speech issues, behavior concerns, etc

I love this little assessment.  I made this about 8 years ago before I knew how to make anything cutesy.  So it's quite plain, but very helpful.  I still use it at the beginning of each school year to get a baseline of my student's academic abilities.  It definitely helps when I'm making lesson plans because I'll already have an idea of who knows what.

When I'm finished with each assessment, it goes into my assessment tub.

 When I meet with each family, I just pull out the entire folder. I keep all assessment throughout the year in this folder.  Then at the end of the year, I take all the folders out, and tuck them in the back of a filing cabinet.  This way, if a student is having any academic trouble in first grade, I can pull out my folder if I'm called to a meeting with the first grade teacher.  I will keep the folders in the filing cabinet until the students go to 2nd grade.  Then I switch them out for the next class that's moving on to first grade.

If you're interested, this little assessment is available in my TpT store for free.  Click here to download a copy.