The Baseline Is Just the Beginning

It’s that time of the year again—time to head back to school, but it’s also time to establish your students’ baseline by assessing their beginning-of-the-year skills.

Screening and assessments are a powerful tool for educators that provide insight into students’ progress, needs, and abilities throughout the school year. As children grow and develop in Pre-K to fifth grade, assessments are imperative for educators to administer so they can adjust instruction or provide necessary remediation.

In Pre-K, the idea of assessments might seem too advanced for such young children, but informal Pre-K assessments are available to holistically evaluate children’s emerging writing, language, literacy, and math skills. Specifically, the Get Set for School^®Pre-K Assessments measure children’s explicit progress with three informal assessments for Readiness & Writing and Literacy & Math.

In K–5, handwriting assessments are particularly helpful for educators to get an individual or whole-class view of students’ developing writing skills. Handwriting assessments also offer a unique look into students’ progress and can provide insight into other subject areas where students are struggling because of their handwriting or writing skills.

The Handwriting Without Tears^® K–5 assessment, the Screener of Handwriting Proficiency, was recently re-launched with exciting improvements for the 2018–2019 school year and provides formative and summative assessments to track students’ progress and identify critical gaps in handwriting and literacy, such as letter memory, reversals, and sentence structure!

As the new school year begins, it’s important to leverage assessments as a powerful tool to guide instruction and further support students, helping them succeed throughout the year.

And, if you want to learn more about Pre-K Assessments or the Screener of Handwriting Proficiency, check out our webinars: Pre-K Assessments: A Systematic Approach and Screening for Success: The Importance of Handwriting Assessments in Every K–5 Classroom.  

By Kathryn Fox Kathryn received her Bachelor of Arts in Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication from James Madison University. She is an experienced editor, copywriter, and technical writer and has worked for the government and in the IT, music, and telecommunications industries. She is currently a writer and editor for Learning Without Tears and loves providing content that empowers young writers and teachers. Kathryn lives in Arlington, Virginia with her best friends.