Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium

Have you heard of Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, also known as SBAC?

 

“The Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (Smarter Balanced) is a state-led consortium working to develop next-generation assessments that accurately measure student progress toward college- and career-readiness. Smarter Balanced is one of two multistate consortia awarded funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2010 to develop an assessment system aligned to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) by the 2014-15 school year.” (SBAC)

“Smarter Balanced member states educate more than 19 million of the nation’s public K to 12 students. These states share a commitment to developing a next-generation assessment system aligned to the Common Core State Standards that provide educators with meaningful feedback and actionable data.” (SBAC)
These states include Alabama, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

And although Kindergarten and first grades will not be taking these tests, we should be preparing our students ahead of time using these new formats that will be implemented in all other formal assessment grades.

Our district has done just that in the area of language arts writing!

Teachers from every grade level collaborated on this project. First, we were educated all about SBAC. Next, we developed the same formats for every grade level as SBAC for our trimester benchmark assessments. Then, we followed our adopted curriculum, back mapped the school year, scoured over the common core standards, and finally came up with new trimester benchmark assessments, rubrics, and revising / editing checklists for grades K through eighth.
These new benchmarks cover the three writing genres: informative / explanatory, narrative, and opinion. Adopted materials used were science texts for informative / explanatory writing, language arts for narrative writing, and social studies texts for opinion pieces.

 

It has been extremely time consuming and will continue to be as we are still trying to perfect our art. However, it will surely be worthy of the efforts as our students will be better prepared for the 2014-15 school year.
Below, you will be able to download an editable version of a revising / editing picture checklist for Kindergarten in 2 writing genres:  informative and narrative. I plan to edit the “topic” pictures each time we write upon a new topic. In addition, since conventions will change over the school year, it will be easy to change this picture each trimester too.

To receive your 2 free downloadable AND editable documents, please click on EACH picture below! These are separate documents.

Informative Writing Document:

Narrative Writing Document:

I hope you find these helpful! AND, they are editable so you can change them the way you like.

Terena

If you found this post and printable resource helpful, please leave a comment! AND, to receive more FREE items about SBAC, please join up as a member. THANKS!