4th Grade Vocabulary Assessment
There are 38 students in 4C’s classroom. I was allocated a 1 hour lesson period to implement my activity and as such, I designed 16 stations 15 with short activates at each station, and one ‘free’ station where the children could choose one piece of candy. The children moved between stations at 3-minute intervals in groups of two to three. When they completed each station, the students deposited their worksheet into the collection box and stamped their ‘station card’ as proof that they visited each station. They changed stations when music was played. As Grade 4’s current unit of inquiry is ‘Light and Shadow’, I did my best to link all of the content to the UOI and keep things relevant to their current learning. Below is an example of the ‘stations card’ that each student got to complete.
Skill 1: Vocabulary Identification. In this station the children will practice identifying the meaning of vocabulary by completing a short matching worksheet, pictured to the right. The children will match the words opaque, transparent, translucent, spectrum and refraction with the picture that best fits that description.
Skill 2: Vocabulary Creation. The second skill that I chose was vocabulary creation. At this station student will use bits of paper with letters on them to spell and assemble three vocabulary words that they have been learning about in class. They will then record their answers on the paper pictured below.
Skill 3: Re-writing in Your Own Words. At this station the students will practice their comprehension and summarization skills by re-writing a passage from a poem about light in their own words. I chose the following excerpt from the poem Escape at Bedtime by Robert Louis Stevenson.
“The lights from the parlor and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars (Stevenson, R., 1885).”
Skill 4: Identifying Misspelled Words. At this station, the students will read a short passage about light and shadow. They will scan the passage for misspelled words and record the answers, and the correct spellings on the paper pictured below.
Skill 5: Identifying Verbs. At this station, the students will read a passage about light and identify the verbs in the passage by highlighting them (Annenberg, C., 2016).
Skill 6: Dictionary Skills. At this station the children will have the opportunity to practice their dictionary skills by looking up the definition of a word in a dictionary. They will then re-write the definition in their own words and deposit their answer in the station collection box.
Skill 7: Identifying the Main Idea. At this station the students have the opportunity to practice identifying the main idea of a piece of text. I chose the poem, I’m Not Afraid of the Dark, by Kenn Nesbitt. The poem reads:
Oh, I'm not afraid of the darkness.
I don't mind an absence of light.
I can't say I'm scared of the sunset
or things that go "bump" in the night.
I've never been frightened of monsters
or tentacles under my bed.
Not skeletons, witches or goblins
or creatures come back from the dead.
I'm not at all worried of werewolves,
or even a vampire's bite.
I'm simply not scared of the darkness,
except when you turn off the light (Nesbitt, K., 1999).
At this station, the children will read the poem and answer the question, What do you think the main point of this poem is? They will write down their answer and put it in the station collection box.
Skill 8: Unscrambling Words. The skill for this station is unscrambling words to form vocabulary words that they know. The words that I used were light, shadow, and reflection. The students viewed the scrambled words at the station and recorded their unscrambled answers on the paper below.
Skill 9: Placing Apostrophes. At this station the students will practice the skill of proper apostrophe use. They will use a colored pen to complete the worksheet shown below.
Skill 10: Sorting Synonyms and Antonyms. At this station the students will review vocabulary related to light by sorting a list of several words into synonyms and antonyms. Each student will complete on worksheet.
Skill 11: Comprehension. At this station, students practiced their reading comprehension skills. They read a short paragraph and then answered three multiple-choice questions based on what they read. The following paragraph from Annenberg in The Science of Light was used.
“Light acts like particles—little light bullets—that stream from the source. Light also acts like waves—ripples in space—instead of bullets. This "wave-particle duality" is one of the most confusing—and wonderful—principles of physics. Light travels very fast and in a straight line.Beams of light can be both reflected and refracted. When light is reflected it bounces back in a different direction. Refraction is when light is bended. Scientists have spent lifetimes developing consistent physical, biological, chemical, and mathematical explanations for these principles. But we can start on the road to deeper understanding without all the equations by acting as scientists do: making observations, performing experiments, and testing our conjectures against what we see (Annenberg, 2016).”
After the students read the paragraph they will complete the following worksheet to answer the comprehension questions.
Skill 12: Identifying Homophones. At this station, the children had the opportunity to practice identifying homophones from a list of words. I gave the students a list of 10 words, 5 pairs of homophone, and had the students record their answers on the form pictured below.
Skill 13: Vocabulary Chain. The goal of this station is to have students identify as many vocabulary words as possible in a short amount of time. At this station students will make a vocabulary chain at least 10 words long by playing the “Last Letter/First Letter Game.” To play the game, the students must reach into a bag and draw a letter. They will then think of a word that begins with that letter. Next, they will use the last letter of that word as the first letter of the next word. Ex: “S” … sun … noisy … yellow … etc. The goal is to make as long a chain as possible during the allotted time. They can record their words on the provided papers.
Skill 14: Finding Hidden Words. At this station the students had the opportunity to do a fun word search to look for hidden vocabulary words. I used a free online word search generator from Busy Teacher (n.d.), to create a word search using vocabulary related to light. The word search I created is pictured below.
Skill 15: Identifying Root Words. At this station the students were asked to identify and circle the root word of several words related to their current unit. The words were chromatic, monochrome, filament, recognize, and credibility. They were asked to circle their answers on the worksheet below.
The implementation of my stations in class 4C was very successful. I suspect the novelty of having a ‘new’ teacher in the classroom contributed to the students’ excitement to participate, but even so, all of the activities were well received. The children all enjoyed the activities and were very successful in completing each station without much assistance. The students were very engaged in the activity and were eager to complete their station card and collect all of the colorful stamps. They were motivated to complete the tasks quickly because of the time pressure and enjoyed moving from station to station and the variety of the tasks. Relevance and a sense of urgency are both important factors in students motivation (Naeghel, J. J., Valcke, M., Meyer, I., Warlop, N., Braak, J., & Keer, H., 2014), and I think that these were two of the factors that contributed to the success of my stations. The stations I created were all tied to the children’s current UOI theme and thus was relevant to all of their current school work. The short duration at each station, only 3 minutes, created a sense of urgency to complete each task, and consequently the students were very engaged in the lesson.
However, as I reviewed the completed worksheets, it was obvious that I underestimated the English level of the class. I was definitely still in ‘kindergarten’ mode, and most of the tasks were far too simple for a fourth grade class. There were almost no wrong answers, though it was clear that there are two children in the class that are struggling with their English. After talking to the homeroom teacher, I learned that these students are relatively new to the school and did not attend an international school prior to this year. Having never taught fourth grade before, especially at a bilingual school, I was very unsure of the level of English the students had and how to create appropriate activities. While my lesson wasn’t overly challenging, it was fun and provided an opportunity for the students to review vocabulary and prior skills.
All in all, the implementation of my vocabulary stations in class 4C went well, and I will definitely keep many of the station ideas in mind for the future as a means to assess progress during units in the future. This type of assessment is a good way to allow the children to practice skills while gathering data to help determine how to differentiate instruction and best guide student learning (Risko, V., & Walker-Dalhouse, D., 2010). One thing I might change is the answer recording process. It was quite arduous to grade each individual paper and assess the results of each student. In the future I would have the students record their answers on one master worksheet instead of several small ones. Unlike preschoolers, 4th graders can be trusted to carry their paper from station to station without destroying it, an oversight I will remember in the future.
References
Annenberg, C. (2016). The Science of Light. Retrieved 1 June from http://www.learner.org/teacherslab/science/light/.
Free Word Search Generator. (n.d.) Busy Teacher. Retrieved 1 June from http://busyteacher.org/wordpuzzle/.
Naeghel, J. J., Valcke, M., Meyer, I., Warlop, N., Braak, J., & Keer, H. (2014). The role of teacher behavior in adolescents' intrinsic reading motivation. Reading & Writing, 27(9), 1547-1565. doi:10.1007/s11145-014-9506-3
Nesbitt, K. (1999). I’m Not Afraid of the Dark. Poetry for Kids. Retrieved 1 June from http://www.poetry4kids.com/poem-460.html#.V1ODc2O48U0.
Risko, V., & Walker-Dalhouse, D. (2010). Making the most of assessments to inform instruction. The Reading Teacher, 63(5), 420-422.
Stevenson, R. (1885). Escape at Bedtime. Retrieved 1 June from http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2015/oct/08/top-10-poems-about-light.
Vocabulary. (n.d.). Reading Rockets. Retrieved 1 June from http://www.readingrockets.org/reading-topics/vocabulary.
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