Year 1
English Support Materials
English snapshot: Read and retell
English/Literacy/Creating texts
| Content Description | Relevant aspects of the Achievement Standards |
|---|---|
|
Create short imaginative and informative texts that show emerging use of appropriate text structure, sentence-level grammar, word choice, spelling, punctuation, and appropriate multimodal elements, for example illustrations and diagrams |
Students create texts that show understanding of the connection between writing, speech and images. They create short texts for a small range of purposes. When writing, students provide details about ideas or events. They accurately spell words with regular spelling patterns and use capital letters and full stops. They correctly form all upper- and lower-case letters. |
Nature of the assessment
Year 1 teachers collaborated to develop an end of semester assessment.
Purposes of the assessment
- obtain information about relative strengths and areas of concern to inform planning for next semester’s lessons
- gain insights into the spread of abilities across both classes to inform longer-term planning and differentiated instruction
- inform reporting to parents.
Stage in the Teaching sequence
End of first semester
Assessment task
Read and retell. The teachers read a favourite story to their students and the students were required to retell the story. The students were given a planning sheet and were allowed as much time as they needed to write their story.
Assessment process
The teachers decided on a rubric for assessing spelling, sentence control, vocabulary, adoption of the narrative genre, and punctuation. The teachers assessed several samples and discussed their marking to ensure they were interpreting the rubric in the same way.
Using the information
The teachers were able to rank order their students, view the spread of ability across the classes and discuss the skills demonstrated by each ability group. The teachers were also able to identify relative strengths and weaknesses in the students’ performances and to use this information to guide lesson planning. For example, they noticed that a small number of students across both classes had a strong sense of storytelling in their writing but their spelling was less well developed. This allowed the teachers to plan differentiated teaching for these students.
The teachers also used the results in conjunction with other information collected during the semester to report to parents.