Kindergarten Reading Assessments

[jmahkorn]

Hi! I'm a new teacher! I'm teaching Kindergarten and am having difficulty assessing students' reading levels. How do you assess your students' reading levels without having them have to read a passage (ie. running records). Meaning, how do I level my students into reading groups in October? I need some assessment suggestions so I can group my students! Thank you!

[sj]

STAR Early Literacy, by Reanaissance Learning--I haven't used it, but school ordered it for PK-2. Looks good. Found Dibel on internet. It's a free downloadable reading skills test with remedial activities. Haven't used it either, but have read positive comments on other chatboards. Morrison-McCall Spelling Scale, available from nine-enterprises.com I have used in 1st for about 8 years. It gives you a grade equivalency based on spelling a list of increasingly difficult words. It was remarkably good at ranking kids by ability, and is group-administered. It has 8 versions, so you can test every month to test growth. JOST (Jordan Oral ??) is a word-call test that gives a grade equivalency. Used it about 5 years. Very good to determine sight vocabulary acquisition. Slosson Oral Reading Inventory--also a word-call test that gives GE, but has 20 words per grade level instead of 10 like JOST. Used it for about 7 years in 1st& switched to JOST because it was faster, but they rendered almost identical results. I put the JOST on Powerpoint and timed the slides at 5 seconds (recommended time for sight word recognition) and recorded results on paper. Very quick and easy to give. All of these could be used in K.

[Shikha]

You can check out the following url:http://www.education-india.net/teacherplanet/evaluation/assessment1.php, the page has a host of links that help teachers assess their students.



<font face="Verdana, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by jmahkorn:
Hi! I'm a new teacher! I'm teaching Kindergarten and am having difficulty assessing students' reading levels. How do you assess your students' reading levels without having them have to read a passage (ie. running records). Meaning, how do I level my students into reading groups in October? I need some assessment suggestions so I can group my students! Thank you!</font>