Assessments

Assessing students is a huge part of our job in special education. Whether it be assessing a student for their present level of performance, a reevaluation, or a brand new student, it should be a smooth and stress-free process.

I recommend grabbing a clipboard and a book ring and creating your own little assessment system that can be used on the go!

Letters and Sounds

For many of our younger students, we need to start with the basics. I like to have an assessment handy that allows me to see if they can recognize letters, both upper and lowercase, as well as produce the sounds.

Counting and Numbers

After assessing the student on letters and sounds, for my younger students, I like to move to numbers and counting. This sheet is perfect to determine what the student can and cannot do in a quick and easy way.

Early Reading Skills

This page consists of sentence prompts for the teacher to read to the student (which is amazing as it takes zero prep and allows for clear, simple directions to give to the students.) It also contains five important early reading skills that students must be able to do when it comes to reading successfully.

Decodable Words

A HUGE part of our role in teaching students to read is assessing a student’s ability to decode words. I like to have real and nonsense words handy.

Sight Words

This page is an assessment that I use a lot, like literally every single kid. It is perfect for students who you already know can do the skills listed previously.

The words on the book ring are given to the student to read from, while the assessment page is on my clipboard so that I can make notes based on how the student reads the words.

Spelling

This spelling assessment is used to determine how well the student can listen to the words given and encode the sounds by writing them on paper.

Writing

What do your students understand about sentences? This is something that often gets overlooked until we suddenly realize our kids can’t write a complete sentence.

This assessment can be completed in just a few minutes and gives insightful information into spelling, grammar, creative ideas, following directions, and more!

Math Facts and Computation

We know that a lot of our students have IEP goals that are centered around math facts and computation. But, we need a good baseline measure.

Where should you focus your time? What has the student already mastered? What do they still need to work on? What errors are you seeing consistently?

This assessment lets me see all of the above!