Friday, March 14, 2014

Well I have completed the formative assessment and I have also went ahead and retaught the skill I had assessed.  We were working on context clues, and this is a very hard skill for some kids.  I am currently looking at some new ideas with context clues so that by the end of the year we might be able to better understand this skill.  I have noticed with such a black and white group of kids, this can be a hard skill.  The words aren't always right there, they also have to infer a little while finding what the word means. Because of this problem, I have found a new unit for inference, that will hopefully help when we are looking for context clues to help us understand new words.  Kids have been trained to give only the RIGHT answer, when in reality there are many RIGHT answers.  My goal is to help these kids understand there is more then one way to solve a problem. 

I had about 2 out of the group of 12 who understood truly understood the context clues sheet we did.  My guess though is if I reassess those 2 with higher level words (they already knew the words they were suppose to be unsure of), they wouldn't know how to use context clues to understand the new words.  So, as of now we are all working on the skill.  I will assess those two next time with harder words to see if they can do this skill. 

I kind of wish I had picked an easier skill to assess, but maybe this will make those easier skills even easier to understand later when I am doing this more often.