Beginning of term Sorting Assessment

This has been first week back for the term for me, and it's been busy! I've hit the ground running... which is probably a good thing - otherwise the term is half gone before I realise it!

I'm working across classes R-7 and I thought I'd share the simple little activity we did in one of the Reception classes this week. We have termly intakes in S.A. (for the last time, we start annual intakes next year) so we've had quite a few new kids in the Reception classes this week. Perfect time for a simple little formative assessment activity to get an idea of where the newies are at, as well as seeing how the older kids are travelling!

We gave each child a copy of this sheet (enlarged to A3 so the pics were easier to cut out)....





Click here for a copy of this page, and one other :)



....and asked them to sort the shapes in a  way that made sense to them. We didn't give many instructions, as we really wanted to see how the kids went about it. It was really interesting to see the different ideas kids had, and to get an idea of their sorting and classifying skills.

To extend those kids who could easily classify the objects, we asked questions such as...

Can you count and record how many are in each group?

Can you order the groups from smallest to largest?

Which group has the most/least?

What other ways could you have sorted....?

Are there any objects that could have fitted into more than one group?

We recorded the conversations with students and their explanations on their sheet so we have a record of their thinking..... a simple but effective way to get a snap shot of kids' understandings!