Assessments

During my time in Ms. Parattee’s 6-8th grade special education classroom, I

found the students learning in many ways and techniques. Each week had a certain

theme in place, for example, in one of the weeks that I was there, the theme was

learning about the food pyramid. Ms. Parattee used a hands-on assignment that

consisted of the students, using construction paper, to cut out and decorate a

strawberry. The students were learning about its seeds and that strawberries belong to

the fruit group of the food pyramid.

Ms. Parattee also uses technology as a way to teach the students. She puts on

educational videos on a daily basis that are songs that teach the students about time.

For example, the videos each focus on a certain topic. One of the videos focuses on

how many seconds are in a minute, minutes in hours, etc. The second video focuses on

days of the week, and the 3rd educational, music video is about the months of the year.

The students sing along and enjoy the videos because they are animated, and the

characters are called “Storybots.” During the days of the week video, the students sing

along with their mouths as well as using sign language. Ms. Parattee focuses on the

kids to make sure they are all following along and singing using the sign language.

During formal assessments, the students get pulled out of the classrooms

individually to take tests. The students do more hands-on activities in the classroom and

not much academics while I was in the classroom. Out of all the times I went, I

experienced the students doing one assignment where they had to read the short
passage and answer questions about the passage. I sat in a table with 4 students and

out of the 4, 2 of them were able to work individually and answer the questions

correctly, 1 of them needed assistance with reading and understanding the questions,

and the 3rd student’s disability is so severe that he does not read.

Informal assessments also consisted of in-class activities such as solving

puzzles or building structures with building toys. Ms. Parattee has a wall shelf full of

activities that the students are free to work on. Each activity is contained in a storage

box and is educational and creative and were mainly hand-made. For example, in one

of the activities, the student must match the words on each index card to the word

outside each envelop. The student must place the identical word inside the envelope

that has the same word written on top. I thought this was a very creative way for the

students to learn identifying and matching words.

Other examples of informal assessments that I have witnessed in the classroom

includes Ms. Parattee going around the classroom testing the students’ knowledge. The

teacher tends to randomly ask the students questions such as, “What are the days of

the week?” Or “What kind of fruit is this?” After an interview with the teacher, I learned

that academics are not really taught in her classroom. The classroom is focused mostly

on teaching the students the life skills that they need to be successful in terms of

independent living. Most of the students arrived to the 6th to 8th grade classroom

knowing the basic academic skills, such as reading.