Universal Assessments: Time to work on elapsed time!

When we go to the doctor’s office, they often start by checking a few things: weight, height, blood pressure, temperature, and pulse rate.  These are basic measurements that can often give clues about someone’s overall health or condition.  Similarly, we use universal assessments as a general measure of student skill.  Several times each year, we administer universal assessments to students to measure oral reading skills, reading comprehension skills, math computation skills, and math application skills.  These are generally short, quick checkups, and give us a quick picture of student skill.  Of course, teachers’ understanding of student skill goes well beyond what these quick assessments show us.  But we find that it is valuable to administer these assessments on a universal basis, because it gives us a more global picture of students’ performance (how a whole class is doing and whether there are any unanticipated results within a class).  Tomorrow, kids will complete the math universal assessments, and at different times throughout the day, I will pull kids to complete the DRA – the individual reading assessment that helps me to pinpoint each student’s independent reading level.

In math class, we’ve been working on elapsed time.  We don’t often think of this as belonging in a unit about measurement, but time is certainly a major form of measurement.  Elapsed time, while a bit tricky, at times, is another great indicator of student skill, similar to the universal assessments.  To correctly answer a word problem involving elapsed time, kids need to be able to identify what information they’re being given, what they need to figure out, and how they will use the available information in order to solve the problem.  We’ve spent a few days on it, and I’m glad to see students’ skills strengthening each day.  Tonight’s homework is another application practice, and I’ve uploaded the answer key for you to use to check over the assignment.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss