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Quick and Easy Assessments

Denise Gagne

Quick and Easy Assessments

For the past 2 weeks I've been teaching a new class of Grade 1 and 3 students. In order to plan instruction, I need to know what they know. When you hear a class perform together you might think they "get it" but it's when I listen to individual students that I can really assess understanding.

One of the first assessments that I did with the students was to assess rhythm reading. As a class, they were doing well with echo clap and poison rhythm.

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I noticed that the children were very engaged during the activity - more engaged than when they did the echo clap as a class, and maybe even more than playing poison rhythm. I think that making them individually accountable for the performance made them really watch and listen to the other students.

The second assessment I did with the Grade 3 students was to have them create and sing a so-mi pattern. I had played the No Robbers game with them - and they loved it.

The students read the rhythms. I taught the song phrase by phrase using solfa, and then the words of the song.

To play the game you have the children form a longways set. Two "robber catchers" close eyes and bending only at the waist try to tag the robbers before they get from one end of the set to the other.

Students get a turn to be a robber or a catcher, but not both on the same day.

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In the next lesson, we reviewed the parts of the staff using my cookie sheets, and using the one line staff figured out which notes in phrase one were high and low. Then I transfererred this to the five line staff - the high note on line 2 is called so and the lower note on line 1 is called mi. This was the third grade class, so they have learned this in other years, but the review was good. Then I had the students create their own so-mi patterns on the cookie sheets and sing them to me. Most of the class was successful with creating their own patterns but when they sang the patterns, only about half of the class could correctly sing what they had created.

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I think that assessing individual students reading of so-mi patterns in the solfa practice section of the musicplayonline.com website would have been good preparation for this activity.

They enjoyed making their own patterns. When they were successful singing them, the class echoed. When they weren't successful, I would sing the pattern for them and the class echoed. Before using this as an assessment for grades, I'd like to do the activity a few more times.

With the first grade class, we did rhythm dictation and rhythm composing with Rhythm Bags - in each bag I put 4 hearts and 8-10 craft sticks. I gave one set to every two students, then put two groups together to create 8 beat patterns. In a class with several ESL students with limited English, all were successful in composing and almost all were equally successful in performing the patterns they'd composed using rhythm names and then playing them on instruments.

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It takes a little time to hand out manipulatives to the students, but using the manipulatives while reading and practising solfa and rhythms using the www.musicplayonline.com webste is key to ensuring that students are engaged and are individually accountable for their learning.

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Denise Gagne
denise@musicplay.ca