Back To School Newsletter

Welcome to School year 2022-2023! I am excited to see everyone back in the classroom. This newsletter is to inform you about the assessment procedures that we will be implementing this year and how they will affect our students.

This year we will be implementing Diagnostics Assessments to determine your student’s English proficiency level at various points throughout the school year. The assessment is called LAS Links and it will be administered via an online platform in a school issued Chromebook. This assessment is designed to be a tool for progress monitoring and student attainment of English proficiency levels aligned to the WIDA standards. The LAS links assessment will measure social and academic language in all 4 domains: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing as well as in all major academic strands: ELA, Social Studies, Science and Mathematics.

Students will also take part in a series of Formative Assessments throughout the semester. These assessments are meant to monitor ongoing student progress in a more flexible environment and provide feedback that can be used by students to improve their learning. Formative assessments in the classroom will help teachers identify the areas in which students need support in so that instruction can be designed purposefully and intentionally to bridge those gaps in the learning. With this method, students will also be able to identify the areas that they are successful in and the areas that they may need to work on. Formative Assessment of our ELL’s will look like journals, group-based projects, entry and exit tickets, comprehension checks, virtual quizzes among others inside of the classroom.

Summative assessments will be given at the end of Units and will assess students on their comprehension, retention, and mastery of the Unit’s WIDA and Content Standards. These assessments will also be administered via a lockdown browser housed in the student’s Chromebook and will allow multiple attempts. The Summative Assessments Data will be used for guidance for subsequent unit lesson plans and instruction, and they will help ELL students to reinforce the overall learning objectives of the Units of study.

All assessments administered this year will provide active data to help students achieve grade-level meaningful learning, identify, and build on academic strengths and provide teachers, students, families, and administrators with relevant and prompt feedback about student progress in the classroom. Our ELL’s will be provided with the appropriate standard allowable accommodations based on their IEP’s, 504’s or Instructional Language Plan models. These accommodations include extended time, alternative location, frequent breaks, and specific time of the day, general administration directions read aloud and repeated as needed.

We will send more information home as the dates for assessments approach as well as test reports with detailed instructions on how to read the results. This way, parents will be able to keep track of student progress in both their English proficiency level development and grade-level content area standards. If you have any questions, I am available to meet with you Monday through Friday from 9:30am to 11:00am. We want to make this school year great and that starts by working together to help our students succeed. We want to stay in touch with you so that we can keep you up to date with your scholar’s progress and development in the classroom. Happy school year!