Printable: Letter Recognition Assessment

Formative assessment is the most important of the three types of assessment used in the classroom, whether it be a regular school classroom, or the homeschool classroom.

Diagnostic Assessment simply tells you what your students already know at the outset of a unit. Probably more useful for the regular classroom teacher who gets a new batch every year, than for the homeschooling parent who really knows her own kids.

Summative Assessment only tells you what they studied the night before the test have mastered (at least until they've forgotten how to do it a few weeks later). Again, more important for the regular classroom teacher who needs to show parents (and admin) that they do actually have teaching and learning occurring in their classroom. (As a middle and high school teacher for over 15 years, I can attest that summative assessment is considered the be-all and end-all for most of the school community...it's all about grades.)

Formative assessment tells you how your kids are actually doing. It can be done through observation, quizzes, conversation...in fact there are numerous ways a teacher can gauge how a student is performing each and every day.  For both the homeschool parent and the class teacher, formative assessment SHOULD be the daily yardstick that informs instruction and provides direction for the curriculum.

I devised a formative letter recognition assessment to use with my kids to see how well they really recognise the letters of the alphabet.  Most assessments of this kind tend to pit letters against unlike letters, and to my thinking, that's not really a fair test... of course it's easy to spot the 'A' when the other symbols you are looking at are completely different letters.

This assessment gives a letter, then requires students to weed out symbols and letters that are actually similar in appearance to the given letter... they may not actually be letters of the English alphabet, but similar looking symbols from other alphabets.

Students can either circle or dot the correct symbols(s), or can practice their fine motor skills by covering up the incorrect symbols with small stickers.

You can find the Formative Letter Recognition Assessment here.

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