So tomorrow is a big day in my household..... well it is for my daughter and her daddy. My oldest who will be starting kindergarten in the fall comes to school tomorrow for her kindergarten screening. It has been hilarious from my view point tonight in the house. Her daddy had to take off to take her since I will be giving the screenings to all the little kinders we have registered for school in the fall. So he is asking her the questions that will be on it, telling her she needs a good nights rest so she will do good on it, and on and on and on. As I am listening I think wow is this really what parents do on the night before screenings!
Now for my benefit I am happy she is growing up, can't wait till I don't have to pay for her to go to school (daycare) anymore, but I am not one of the parents who get all mushy cause their baby is starting big kid school. Now her daddy on the other hand is eating it up. He took off to take her tomorrow, has been talking about school shopping for months now, is planning on taking her 1st day off, so he can take her to school. (It's not like I won't be going there) I am thankful she has at least one parent who is acting like a normal kindergarten parent.
I am excited though. Daddy rarely gets a day off, so for him to take off and bring her to her test, is huge. And afterwards they are going to Wallabies to play and have a daddy/daughter day!
Now back to my point.... what do you do to see where the kinders you will be getting in the fall are? We use the Brigance. Granted we still have the OLD version that honestly I think most 3 year old's could score well on. I hate the test we use, it doesn't show us anything unless the kid has not been worked with AT ALL at home! If they don't make at least at 80, then there is some concern. Most of them EASILY score above an 80.
I really wish we gave the new Brigance which we could actually get more information about what the child knows or doesn't. It tests ABC Recognition, drawing a person, counting to 30. I mean really that would give us teachers more of an idea about how to split the kids when making rosters, to give the teachers a fair chance of high, middle, and low. But the test costs money and we all know that we don't have ANY of that!
It still amazes me that parents think their child has to do well on the screener to get into Kindergarten. Doesn't matter what they score if they are 5 years old or will be by Sept. 30th they go to K.
So what do you use to test kids coming into Kindergarten?
6 comments:
We use the Brigance too but the newest one. A couple of years ago we used a more strenuous test that we created ourselves with the help of our Reading and Math series to help us place students in classes to make it more balanced. In theory this was a great idea, because nobody wants to have an all low class, but our county doesn't allow enough testing days to do this. We test the first week of school, and parent's did not like not knowing who their child's teacher was.So we went back to just testing Brigance.
When I taught K, we used that one you were talking about at the end, with the pic and the alphabet.
I never liked it because they had to score really low at the beginning of the year for the inevitable 100 they were going to get at the end to look like growth.
And previous admin put too much stock into it at the end of K. Who knows, it might change this year!
Staci
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We use the newer brigance but I still am not a fan. It's ok for entering kindergarten but then we use it at the end of the year too. I just don't think it's a good assessement of what we've accomplished this year. Speaking of that, I should probably get on giving that assessment. I think we have to turn our scores in by the end of the month. Whoops. That's so cute that your husband is so excited about your daughter starting kindergarten. I hope she has a fantastic daddy/daugther day.
We use the new Brigance test. This is all I know. So I'm curious what the "old" brigance looks like?
The old one has the very basics. First name, full name, age, address, and bday. Colors, count to 10, I'D #'s 1-5, name 10 pics(dog, cat, key, girl, boy, etc) write first name.
Pick which object is different from the other three.
The new one count to 30, write first and last name, telephone,addition, is upper and lowercase letters, draw a person with 10 specific body parts. It would greatly make scores different from the ones we got today.
We tested 80 some and only 7 scored less than 80. Most were in the 90's.
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