It’s that time of the year again—time to head back to school, but it’s also time to establish your students’ baseline by assessing their beginning-of-the-year skills.

Screening and assessments are a powerful tool for educators that provide insight into students’ progress, needs, and abilities throughout the school year. As children grow and develop in Pre-K to fifth grade, assessments are imperative for educators to administer so they can adjust instruction or provide necessary remediation.

In Pre-K, the idea of assessments might seem too advanced for such young children, but informal Pre-K assessments are available to holistically evaluate children’s emerging writing, language, literacy, and math skills. Specifically, the Get Set for School^®Pre-K Assessments measure children’s explicit progress with three informal assessments for Readiness & Writing and Literacy & Math.

In K–5, handwriting assessments are particularly helpful for educators to get an individual or whole-class view of students’ developing writing skills. Handwriting assessments also offer a unique look into students’ progress and can provide insight into other subject areas where students are struggling because of their handwriting or writing skills.

The Handwriting Without Tears^® K–5 assessment, the Screener of Handwriting Proficiency, was recently re-launched with exciting improvements for the 2018–2019 school year and provides formative and summative assessments to track students’ progress and identify critical gaps in handwriting and literacy, such as letter memory, reversals, and sentence structure!

As the new school year begins, it’s important to leverage assessments as a powerful tool to guide instruction and further support students, helping them succeed throughout the year.