Love Literacy
Sparking Creativity & Sharing Ideas to enhance instruction
Fountas & Pinnell
Updates & Changes
- Full day or two half day release time for all classroom teachers to administer running records in winter and spring. Coordinate sub time with your principal & building secretary.
- Allowing for more teacher flexibility with schedules, please note you will have the month of January, until your building's Data Review, to complete assessing for all K-3rd graders and 4th-6th graders who did not make the fall benchmark. You do have additional flexibility to begin testing students starting now in December as you wish.
- We will enter our running record data into the OurSchoolData system at our February PD day.
- Progress Monitoring in March has been changed to a voluntary testing window.
Below are some tips before we get started with our winter testing cycle:
Reminders
Reading your Benchmarking books and questions before you assess will make scoring much smoother.
Fiction and nonfiction texts should be alternated. If you ended testing in fall with a fiction selection, a nonfiction selection at the next level should be given this time when the student is assessed.
Preview the coding marks and follow the standardized Book Introduction.
Click here to use the JPS Guide to Scoring. This guide will help you determine instructional level.
Instructional level means that students would most likely have high accuracy and limited proficiency in comprehension, or lower accuracy and proficient or approaching proficiency comprehension.
Testing Tips
- Test your students below benchmark and with the least amount of stamina during independent reading first.
- Have materials ready before you begin testing.
- You will need a Pencil, JPS Scoring guide, Assessment forms, Leveled books, & F & P calculator.
- Keep 2-3 copies of recording forms in the hanging folders in your kit for easy access to multiple assessments while testing.
- Make notes about behaviors or skills on the side or last page of your running record while you are scoring so you can easily use your data for instructional decisions.
Comprehension Conversation
Please remember that prompts may be paraphrased, omitted (if answered in a different way), or reordered to make the conversation flow better.
To start the conversation, you could try to offer an open-ended prompt such as “Talk about what happened in the story...” or “Talk about what you learned in this book."
Scoring is more to do with ease of the answers than whether prompting was needed.
Do not judge a student’s response at a lower level because you had to prompt their thinking.
Let us support YOU!!
- Please remember to secure a sub for the Winter F & P testing.
- You have the month of January, until your building's Data Review, to complete assessing for all K-3rd graders and 4th-6th graders who did not make the fall benchmark. If you want to start testing before January, you have that additional flexibility to begin testing students now.
- Please reach out to Lori & Janet for any questions that arise during testing. We are here to help with the entire process!
- If time gets crunched, please remember to email, text, or call for assistance!
Diversity Training Opportunity
When: Thursday, January 11th
Time: 6:30-8:30pm
Place: 210 Lyon Street NE (GRCC Early Childhood Laboratory)
Cost: FREE
Let's work together to use the literature in our classrooms to support cultural understanding and children's development of personal and social identity.
Unlocking potential to maximize growth
ldood@jpsonline.org
Email: ldood@jpsonline.org
Website: loveliteracyjps.weebly.com
Location: Jenison, Georgetown Township, MI, United States
Phone: 616-457-8488
Twitter: @janetschultz4