PREPARING FOR THE END OF THE SCHOOL YEAR (1)
The end of the school year is right around the corner. Before you know it, you will be administering final exams, averaging grades, and marking the final yearly grade for the student. As you know, a grade does not tell the whole story about a student. Consider developing a general checklist of 10 to 15 “CAN-DO” statements that you can complete for each student. The “CAN-DO” statements should be based on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills and the proficiency level of Spanish. The list should consist of wide-ranging statements that demonstrate a snapshot of what the student learned during the school year. The following are examples of “CAN-DO” statements.
| Mark: 1) Fair (2) Good (3) Very Good | 1 | 2 | 3 | |
| The student can obtain information about a person, place, or event. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can express information about his family and himself orally and in writing. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can describe persons, places, and/or events. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can understand a short conversation between others. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can read and understand simple ads in Spanish. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can utilize correct grammar when speaking or writing. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can respond to questions relating to familiar topics. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can make comparisons between the cultures studied and his own. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ | |
| The student can relate cultural customs of the cultures studied. | ☐ | ☐ | ☐ |
Short Summary: Provide a short summary that may help the next level Spanish teacher understand the student’s strengths and weaknesses.
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Completing this checklist for each student may seem like unnecessary extra work, but consider how this would affect your lesson planning if you knew the level of Spanish proficiency of incoming students. You would have basic building blocks for your delivery of instruction. This list will only work if all teachers in the department understand and use performance indicators and proficiency levels for each level of language. In addition, they must determine the descriptors for Fair, Good, and Very Good.
