PSIII Weekly Journal- Week 7 (October 6 - 10)

Whew! What a crazy week it has been over at MMH. As a staff, we collectively decided
to blame it on the coinciding of both a full moon and the lunar eclipse, but regardless of the
reasons, there is no denying that there were some kooky kids this week! Despite this, it was
actually a great week where we got lots done, with highlights including a very successful year
plan meeting with my principal, a wonderful production of Stone Soup that my grade 2 music
class performed for their parents, book buddies, and kindergarten classes, a highly triumphant
quiz in social studies, and a fun trip to the corn maze with my grade 5s to send us off to our
Thanksgiving weekend in good holiday spirit!
My biggest Aha! moment this week came in the area of differentiated assessment. In
social studies over the past few weeks, we have been working on an Introduction to Canada
unit. This unit concluded this week with a brief quiz where students had to label a map of the
provinces and territories of Canada, and answer ten fill in the blank questions where students
provided the name of the capital city of a given province or territory. We worked hard to
prepare for our quiz this week, and studied in class using many different techniques such as
flash card manipulates where they had to race to match up their cards, SMART Notebook
games, practice worksheets, and verbal quizzing. I have two students in this class with
exceptional learning needs: one is fairly new to Canada with an ELL coding, and one who
struggles quite a lot with reading and writing. Though I did not give a wordbank on the test, I
did allow these two students to take a bag of our province and capital flashcards with them, so
that they could write the test in the same manner we practiced, and then copy the appropriate
wordsspelling and allinto the appropriate blanks, which is a skill I have seen them both use
before. About halfway into the 15 minute quiz, I looked over at the girl with the reading and
writing difficulties, and noticed she was crying. I came over to find that she had written a
question mark in every blank on the test and had also written 0/20 at the top of her test.
Despite her learning difficulties, she tries extremely hard in school and is motivated to succeed,
so I knew that she was feeling terrible in that moment. I also knew from my formative
assessments over the past few days that she actually knew the information fairly well, and so I
had to find a way for her to prove that to me and differentiate her test in the moment. From
the pile of 26 flashcards on her desk, I pulled four of them with one of them being the correct
answer for question 1. Essentially, I turned it into a manipulative multiple choice question.
Before I could even finish explaining why I had rearranged the cards, she reached out, grabbed
the correct card, and transferred the spelling into the first blank. Seeing that her mood was
instantly turned around, I sat with her and completed each question in this week. When all was
said and done, she got 85% on her test, but I think I learned way more from that experience
than she did. I realized that just because I differentiated her test at the beginning, I hadnt
actually done anything useful because I hadnt helped her in any way. Instead, I had changed

her test simply for the sake of changing it, because her real problem was the monumental task
of reading 26 cards every time she was looking for one answer. I know that next time we have a
test, I will design hers to be multiple choice, because she proved to me that she can excel in
that situation. It also reinforced the importance of formative assessment, because had I not
have know that she did know the information from our work in previous classes, I might have
mistaken her not answering anything as not knowing the content instead of not being able to
demonstrate the content. It truly changed the way I will view assessment practices in my
classroom.