1.2: Indicators
Next, the other co-chair goes over results of beginning- and mid-year assessments across a wide range of early literacy indicators. She has made pie charts and tables showing changes in kindergartners achievement from beginning to middle of year. While pointing out areas of progress, she also suggests what she thinks are important performance levels they should target. Note the discussion between the two co-chairs, about halfway through this segment, concerning what should be the target for children's writing performance in kindergarten. Each has a somewhat different perspective, but there's no disagreement about the need to encourage as many children as possible to become more and more proficient in their early writing development. At the end of this segment, the AALT representative reports that Mia will be assisting K teachers with sight-word instruction. Mia is the school’s writing coach and an valuable resource to the each of the grade level teams.
Sandy The one that's up right now is um, beginning of the year writing communication. And as you can see, in the beginning of the year, we had 0% of our kids at 4's. The majority of our kids were falling in the 2 category at 50% and then in the 1 category we had 36%, and that was at the beginning of the year. Now you can see what we've done so far with the mid year. In the 4 category we got 6%. Our 3 category grew; it's now at 33%. And basically the other main thing that happened was the 1 category shrank. And we still have a lot in the 2 category at 47%, so these are our kids that we're really going to want to target to move up. And what we want to think about is why did they not make the 3 category? That's the key thing we have to think about so we can try to move them up. At the mid year now, we got 2% 4's. But look: 39% are now in the 3 category. So if you look at that we've got 41% of the kids that are on grade level. Gerardo Right. Diana But we still haven't moved very, we haven't made a big inroad on the 4's. That could be another goal. Sandy The 4's, though, that's like, that's going to be somebody who's functioning at a first grade level. Gerardo First grade level. Sandy Because on the rubric they have to write four sentences. So probably that, I would think that might stay- Diana But I think they could write four sentences. If they're writing three, they can write four if we help them to- Sandy Yeah but I think we really need to put our energy- Diana Well let's work on that- Sandy On the 2's. Diana We're going to talk about it. Sandy Yeah. Diana Let's talk about it. Sandy Okay..... For the beginning of the year letter sounds, we only had basically 79% were still in the 2 category that didn't know their letter sounds, and were not gonna, they were not going to be writing, scoring high in their writing assessments if they didn't know their letter sounds. For blending um, that's an area we still have a lot, we have room for improvement on. The kids um, in the beginning of the year, there were 82% in the "few" category for blending. Now we're down to 52% but there's still a lot there and that's such a key for reading. Then for sight words like Diana was saying, that's a school, that's a school goal that the whole school is working on. And we also can, um, there's room for improvement here. We saw 70% of the kids are in the few category for our sight word assessment test. And that's why Mia has been coming to our common planning meetings so she's going to all the grade levels um, common planning meetings so that she can help us work on the sight words and spelling school-wide.