Summary of October/November assessing

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to have the opportunity to see say thank you to everyone who helped with our assessing in the last few weeks of October and beginning of November. We assessed every child in Grade 1 at Obs and our new schools to see who will be a member of the Shine Centre for next year. Our assessment is based on letter recognition (sight and sound) and the decoding of words. It's always fun to see the volunteers practice the sounds of the letters themselves as I think many of us have forgotten how we learned to read when we were small! Here's a short recap of the assessing:

We started with 10 volunteers helping at Claremont Primary, which is one of our new schools for 2009. We were able to do a class of 40 in about three hours - a task that wouldn't have been possible without their help. Snuggled right in Claremont this is certainly a well loved school and we're anxious to lend our support to those readers in need.

The next week we went to Prestwich Primary (in Greenpoint) which is the other school that will be opening in February 2009. We spent two days in the school and assessed over 80 children. We sat in a lovely room with nice big windows that will become the Shine Room next year. Prestwich has a wonderful population of children who the majority are, unfortunately, extremely weak and who we hope to turn into great readers next year.

The next two weeks were devoted to our future project: Zonnenbloem Boys and Zonnenbloem Girls. We were able to assess each school (one class per grade at each school - schools are on the same property and sit next to each other) with help from our wonderful volunteers. These schools currently do not have a room for us to use for the beginning of 2009, but we look forward to finding a solution for that problem sometime in the next year.

After completing Zonnenbloem, we turned our focus back to our pilot school, Observatory Junior School. We had an overwhelming response to helping out with assessing which was not only our Grade 1's, but our current Shine Learners in Grades 2 and 3. We were able to do ALL of their assessments in one week and had astonishing results! (In a future blog)

After all the assessments were completed (at all schools) the Grade 1's were scored and the children who scored below 50% will be our new Shine learners in Grade 2
(2009). Our assessment of Grade 2 and 3 children will let us know if they have made enough progress to leave the Shine Centre or if they will continue on in 2009.

It was an enormous effort to take on all of this assessing and we could not have done it with the generosity of our volunteers and their time. I must definitely thank Kathryn though because she is the one who orchestrated the entire assessment schedule, scored most of the assessments (250+), went back to meet with the Headmasters of these schools and has been an instrumental force in the Shine Roll Out project for 2009.

Thanks to everyone and happy holidays!
Carrie