We send out lots of emails - teaching tips, company news, contests, photos from educator events, and information about new publications - but few have elicited as much interest as the news that we were bringing out Hineni Assessments. "We want ‘em now, not at the end of April," was the common refrain. So we accelerated the printing process and published Hineni 1, 2, and 3 Assessment in early April. We hope you’re using them successfully.

     Assessing student progress at the end of the school year is important so that you can:

     Developmentally appropriate assessment tools can be used to break learning into discrete, meaningful skill sets that are practical and specific. To be useful, they must be easily administered, user friendly, and based on your school’s curriculum and standards.

     While assessments are important to gauge each student’s knowledge within the context of the entire class, we also want our students to learn from their results. To that end, consider one or more of the following after administering the assessments:
1. Thoroughly review the content as a class.

2. Pair or group students to correct errors by referring to their textbooks..

3. Review class-wide errors and, if necessary, reteach the material..

4. Work through challenging material with individual students..

     We’re now hearing the call for formal assessments for Shalom Ivrit. To that end, we’ve recently published benchmarks for the Shalom Ivrit series reflecting students’ increasing skills levels in each book in the series. Visit www.behrmanhouse.com/fortheed/itc/024.shtml to view and download the benchmarks. Next year we plan to bring out formal assessments for Shalom Ivrit—like those for Hineni—to evaluate key skills, such as comprehension, reading accuracy and fluency, and sentence composition.