Measuring Progress on Vocabulary Skills

It’s progress monitoring time in our school district. That amazing week where you get to write all 50+ progress reports on your students! I know it can be long and tedious, but if you look at it like I usually try to …it’s amazing. Don’t get me wrong, not all of my students make extreme gains each nine weeks, but most of them make good ones…the kind that gets you motivated for the next nine weeks!
One of my kinder kiddos has been working hard and making some crazy good progress on animal vocabulary words. I initially used THIS SCREENER from Speaking Freely SLP on TpT to establish baseline of his animal knowledge…which was expressively 3 out of 16 accurate. Bummer!

Over the next three weeks, we played animal matching games, used plastic animals, stuffed animals, and watched videos on animals. His reading teacher even resorted to ordering a “vintage” See and Say online to provide any and all association opportunities for this little guy to reference.

We read and acted out From Head to Toe…
We read Goodnight Gorilla… with objects and pictures…

Well, even with a two week Christmas break during this time, he got it! I don’t know who was more excited…. I know I for sure showed it as I walked around the school showing off his progress chart! This is a student that our ENTIRE campus has invested TONS of work and thought into. A child we have all grown professionally and emotionally as a result of his presence.

Our final activity…because he demonstrated mastery level!… was using this set of magnets that I found over Christmas break on sale at Burke’s Outlet. I thought I would jazz up the excitement level with a little impromptu sorting activity. I placed all of the animals we were targeting with a couple extra that I figured he already knew on the tray of my easel.

To begin, I said the animal’s name so that he receptively identified it first. For example, “Find the giraffe“.

This student lacks confidence in his own abilities. He used to always answer, “I don’t know!” for every question asked. Now he has been taught to say, “I’m still thinking!” while shrugging and beaming that big adorable grin…

So for this task, he simply pointed to each animal named. Keep in mind he was pointing to animals named in an array of what…20? He KNEW them all! I was ready to assess him expressively.

The activity I had prepared was informally about sorting/categorization to help him further his association skills of the vocabulary we were targeting, but that wasn’t what I was keeping data on. I only used that part of the task to keep him fully engaged in the session.

My bright little buddy took each animal off of the tray and placed it where he thought it would live.

He had to say their name and where they lived in a sentence. He wasn’t too sure about their living quarters, but it was fun helping him figure it out. I got a good laugh out of him when I said, “If it can EAT YOU, you don’t want it on the farm!” Then he would say, “The duck can’t eat you so it must be on the farm!”