Kindergarten Literacy Assessment Tools

Delta just rolled out a suite of tools for Kindergarten teachers for Literacy Assessment and Evaluation. The suite was designed by a team of K, Grade 1 and Learning support teachers. We aimed to provide useful tools to teachers to enable us to share common language and expectations for K that both reflect the new curriculum and dovetail into our Grade 1 literacy benchmarks.

Underlying this work is a Print Acquisition Continua that the team created to capture the developmental stages of children discovering how print works and using it for their purposes.  One of the main reasons we decided to create a new continua was to be able to describe where kids are at on the journey based on what they CAN do.

We know how important it is for us as early learning teachers to help kids crack the literacy code. We also know that this is one small piece of the broader literacy competencies that we want for out kids. Teachers asked for and we gave them a set of term by term benchmarks that includes both the Print Acquisition skills and the broader literacy understandings, competencies and knowledge captured in the new curriculum.

To go along with these common standards and continua, we've provided 6 optional assessment tools for teachers to use or adapt for their purposes. The 6 optional assessment tools are focussed on the Print Acquisition continua. We think this is information teachers need to have about all their students. How teachers are able to get that information can change from class to class and from student to student.

For each area of Oral Language, Reading and Writing, teachers have access to an Observation Frame, a Class Profile, and an Interview Protocol. Each interview protocol includes both metacognition/self-concept questions, feedback and goal setting.

The entire collection of tools and resources can be found in the google folder below:

Delta Kindergarten Literacy Assessment Google Folder

We view all these documents as works in progress and are actively inviting feedback from our teachers as they implement this year. Other thoughts and feedback are also welcome :)