Kindergarten Round-Up with ESGI

Kindergarten round-up or pre-assessment day.  How does your school  do it?  Last year we tried something different.  What we were doing in the past wasn't working.  Instead of having students come a few days before the start of school for an assessment, we waited for the first day of school.

Here is how it worked.  First, we assigned each student to a group;  yellow circles, red squares, blue triangles... Then the groups were rotated and mixed up throughout the first two days of schools. (see at the bottom for more details) I might have had the circles and squares in one session, but then the next session would be the squares and triangles and so forth.

Our goal was for all four teachers to see all of the students and for all of the students to have an opportunity to be together at some point during the rotations. During the rotations all of us taught the exact same lessons.  We had worked together during the summer to design the lesson and prep them.  Then, while we were teaching the lessons and the students were completing their tasks our support staff were assessing and evaluating our students.

All of our support staff were given an iPad to assess each student using ESGI.  We had created an assessment within ESGI to determine where our students were academically.  With ESGI the support staff could quickly tell if a student had already been assessed or not.  As teachers, we were able to observe and take notes on students' behavior and social skills or anything else that we had noticed because we weren't focussing on the assessments.

At the end of the second day, we printed out the assessments to create our class lists.  The goal was to create balanced classes academically, and behaviorally.  The next day- day 3 we tried out the classes in the morning to see how they worked.  If there were any huge problems, we discussed at lunch, made changes.  The students then took home a letter telling their parents who their teacher would be beginning on Monday.  We start school on Wednesdays, so this is a Wednesday-Friday program for us.

Having ESGI makes this work I don't think we could do the assessment portion without ESGI.  Last year we had almost all the kids assessed the first day.

If you haven't tried ESGI now is the time.  You can get a 60 Day free trial just in time for Back-to-School.

(Rotation Explanation) Our groups always began and ended at the same classroom so parents knew where to drop off and pick up their students.  For example, I had yellow circles,  The yellow circles came into my room, after picking up their name tag from the pocket chart outside my door.  We quickly took attendance and got right to work.  On the first day we did 2 rotations with the same groups because it is the first day and it is scary.  After that, we mixed the kids.  Day two we did three rotations. On the third day we did a trial mock class of what we thought our class would look like.  If there were any problems we fixed at lunch.  Then the students took home a parent letter with who their permanent teacher would be.