Spark It: A free reading assessment tool for parents and teachers

It’s unfortunate, but every year we encounter struggling readers who have been lost in the shuffle or flown under the “reading radar” for years. So you can imagine how pleased we were to come across Spark it, a free reading assessment tool that not only evaluates readers’ skill level, but also offers recommendations for improvement and activities to develop their skills.

What impressed us about Spark It was its “user-friendliness.” As parents facilitate the four parts of the assessment, they’re guided by pop-up icons that tell them exactly what to do, when to do it and what they should say. Should parents experience any issues during the assessment, they can refer to the “tips” icon.

SparkIt assesses students’ proficiency in four areas:

Vocabulary (Picture Identification): Looking at pictures of objects and correctly naming the objects
Fluency (Rapid Naming): Quickly naming a string of familiar items—a series of numbers, letters or colors
Phonemic Awareness: Understanding how individual letter sounds combine to make a word and saying them
Letter and Word Calling: Pronouncing letters and words correctly, either by sight (just knowing it) or by sounding them out

reading assessment2

Once the reading assessment is finished, you’ll receive instant results (see above picture) along with a personalized plan to help the reader improve his or her skills.

Tags: assessment, it, readers, reading, spark, struggling

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Permalink Reply by Ruchita Parat on April 9, 2013 at 8:53am

great effort truly a task to appericate even i would like to share some of my celebrations

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Permalink Reply by E. Spong on April 9, 2013 at 6:19pm

Thanks, this is really helpful. There is a girl at my church who is going into 6th grade and her grandparents were noticing her struggling with her schoolwork (specifically reading). I will suggest this.

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Permalink Reply by Karen Cameron on April 10, 2013 at 10:06am

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond! I appreciate it. I hope that she finds this to be a useful resource.

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Permalink Reply by kayla patterson on April 11, 2013 at 8:44am

This is an excellent resource. I am currently taking a literacy class in graduate school and this will definitely be something I share with my fellow classmates!