Week #2

After reading the very long chapter about Informal Assessments, I feel I have enough information to get started on the process of working with the student I selected. The student I'm working with is a 7th grader and he's probably two grade levels below and it makes sense to test him several times a year. My question is, after assessing students at the beginning of the year when should we do the assessments again? Four times a year? Should all students go through all of the assessments or just the lowest? I was very interested in the section about how to interpret and apply what is discovered in the IRI scores and observations. This is the area that will be the most meaningful and one I'm not good at doing yet. It'll be a good strategy to get together with other teachers and talk about the students who are low and see if there is a consensus about how to modify instruction.

Another piece that seemed like a challenge to manage was keeping track of observations. The one I like best is keeping a separate sheet for each student in a binder. The text gives guidelines for writing the observations that were helpful too.

The chapter about spelling and writing was great fun to read in hindsight. What I mean is, I've learned much about spelling by being in the classroom, talking to other teachers and by continuing education classes. I thought about the development of writing and reading being very closely connected after the reading.