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1.2: Indicators

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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.