Assessment Blog Post 2

I want my students to be able to know how to properly write a letter to someone. In order to achieve this learning goal, I will use the social cognitive theory to come up with lesson plans. I will use modeling as a tool to teach my students the correct way to write a letter to someone. I will begin by reading my students many different picture books that use letters as their form of storytelling. This will give the students an idea of what a good letter looks and sounds like. Then I will discuss the different parts of a letter with them and we can collectively collaborate and write a thank you letter to the janitor for cleaning our classroom every night. The books and the practice letter will give my students something to model. Then they will practice writing letters to each other. For a final assessment, I will have the students write me a letter about a specific topic and turn it in for a grade. I will grade them on content, correct letter writing procedures, and grammar/punctuation. This type of assessment is formative and formal. It is formative because I would not give them a test over the material and we would discuss our letters after the grading process. I think this type of assessment is effective because it would give me a good idea if the students not only know the steps to writing a letter, but can also sit down and actually use that information to write a letter of their own. In this way, this type of assessment can also sort of be considered a performance assessment. It is assessing whether the students can complete the task of writing a letter correctly.