Assessment Tools

This month as a Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador I am to write about assessment. I have already talked about a great assessment tool in a post a couple weeks ago about the More Math and More Literacy workbooks, you can see that post here. I am planning to use that as my assessment tool for my son because I like the way it is formatted and gives me something easy to compare his work to. As a homeschooler my need for assessment tools is a little more unique. I live in a state that does not require much in the way of record keeping or lesson planning. I do these things for myself so that I am able to be better organized and if I ever needed to show anyone what we were working on I could. However in the area of assessment I find that daily observations and conversations with my kids serve me better. With this being said I know that some people have stricter laws regarding what is required for homeschooling, some people using this program might have day cares and preschools. So since I spend a lot of time telling everyone how we use the assessment tools I realized that Mother Goose Time has a lot of tools that I don't necessarily use but that might be useful for someone else. So this post is going to highlight some of the pages they include in the curriculum that helps assess, and document a students success.

First off every month includes this fantastic skills chart. It lists every skill that you will hit if you do every lesson in the teacher guide and it tells you what lessons and days you will be working on the skills. I mean if you just kept this on file alone it would be plenty of proof of what you were working on. It would also serve as a great guide for those who have to write what they are going to be doing for the state and would be a great guide for lesson planning. Here is a picture of the whole chart as well as a close up.

Another Great tool they offer is a way to document a students work and make a portfolio to either keep on file for your homeschool, or to give to parents so they can see how their child is doing. In the Teacher Guide certain activities are starred and they give instructions on what you are supposed to look for and document while doing this particular activity. Once it is complete you can save that item aside with all needed notes and you can put it into the portfolio. Mother Goose Time also provides the cover pages for the portfolios as well as the theme and skills pages to put in the portfolio each month. In this next picture you can see the star by the More or Less activity and it prompts you to take a photo of the child participating in this activity and to write down your observations on if the child understood the concepts of more and less or bigger and smaller. You would then include the photo and observation comments in the portfolio.

This next picture is of the chart that lists all the starred activities for the month. If you do all these and document them for the portfolio you will end up with a sampling of all the main skills that were hit on for that month. It really is a great tool for classrooms or homeschoolers with laws that require more proof of what they are learning.

 The last tool I want to talk about is found in the back of the Teacher Guides. It lists all the skills and goals that are found throughout the lessons and gives you benchmarks. You can easily use this to see where your student falls in with the skills. Benchmark C tells you what an average toddler should be able to do. Benchmark D is a good indicator of what a preschooler should be doing or working towards, and Benchmark E is for Pre-Primary. This would give you a way to score your child on a scale of meeting, exceeding, or needing help in these skills. Here is a picture of what that resource looks like.

The really great thing about this program is that no matter how much you need to or want to document it is all there for you and laid out easy to use and understand. If you are homeschooling you don't have to worry that you might be missing something. Or if you are a classroom teacher they make it very easy to keep records and keep parents informed of what the students are doing and how they are doing. So even though I don't use all of this for my schooling needs I like knowing that it is there and I like knowing that I could pull out the skills chart and have that as proof of all the fantastic skills my little guy is learning. I hope this post gives a better idea of how assessment, observation, and documentation of students work is with Mother Goose Time.




*Mother Goose Time has generously provided this curriculum to us in exchange for our stories and honest opinions*