Phonemic awareness is one of the main things that children in my grade level are taught. The assessments we give check for the understanding of the many aspects of phonemic awareness. We assess for understanding in the areas of letter recognition, vocabulary, rhyming, alliteration, words in a sentence, syllabication and onset rhyme. I do like this type of assessment for our four to five year old children but they also require us to test our three year old students and this is a challenging task. It is funny in a way because when we first test the three year olds they are very excited to get tested. When we start and they have no idea what I'm asking them they nod yes with a great big smile to every question I ask them. Most of these students soon begin to understand later in the year but there are some that make take more than one school year to be sucessfull.

Progress Monitoring

Chapter 4 also had a whole lot of information and technical terms that I had never heard of before. It was on informal assessments and the progress monitoring that comes with it. The types of assessments that were listed on there I have never used on my students. I did read about some like the DIBELS (available for pre-K through 6 grade) that are used in our district but they are only provided for kinder and up. The only assessment that we as pre-k teachers have to administer is the CIRCLE test which was created by the Center for Improving the Readiness of Children for Learning and Education (CIRCLE). It is now the Children’s Learning Institute based out of the Health science center in Houston. I have also been involved with this organization through a grant that provided me with many classroom supplies that provide me with the materials that will help make my students successful. The TEEM grant also provided about 50 hours of teacher development in the area of early literacy through research based practices. The grant helped me to understand the assessment that we administer to our students and how the students will benefit in the long term if they are successful learners. The only problem is that I was only one of about 20 teachers involved in the grant that represented our whole district.

Chapter 3

The chapter on informal assessment was long and it had a lot of information. I haven't really had a chance to really apply many of the assessments that were written about but we do have our own share of assessments. Many people don't think that you can accurately assess a three or four year old child but there are many ways that a teacher can check these young students for understanding. The prekinder teachers at my school all have to conduct the circle test on all of our students. Sometimes it can be inaccurate if the child answers yes to all the questions he/she is bound to get about 50% right.(we just have to be sure to note it) This test really focuses on letter recognition, vocabulary and phonemic awareness items. I don't like conducting this test because it is very long and repetitive when you have to test 22 student in the beginning of the year the middle and the end of the year. I do like the information that the test does provide for me. It breaks the student s off into groups in their areas of need and even provides me ideas and activities that may help them improve the certain skill that they have not mastered.

Another assessment that our teachers provide is a portfolio for each one of our students. They are easily assessable to students and both the teacher and the student get to decide what they want to put in the portfolio. I really like this system because we have work in there for the beginning of the year and when we look back I can really see the major improvements that the children have made.