Sacrament Assessment

As I have stated previously in 2014 we decided as a staff on four concepts that we would like our children to gain through our Sacrament strand teaching.
1. Grace is God's love and strength working with us and the world.
2. Sacraments bring grace.
3. Know the seven sacraments.
4. Know the signs and symbols of the sacraments.

These four concepts will be the context of the Sacrament strand teaching throughout the whole school. We do continue to teach the learning outcomes for the Religious Education curriculum at each year level in context of these four concepts.

We agreed:
For the Junior Hubs the class teacher will decide the content of the assessment to make their overall teacher judgement. This will be entered on the assessment gathering file and the children will be marked out of 4  for concept 1. (1= uni-structural, 2=multi-structural, 3=relational, 4=extended abstract) for all the other concepts out of 7. Teachers new to our school are supported by a tagged teacher and Overall Teacher Judgments (OTJs) are formed in hubs. Our next step is to look at forming OTJs across the school.

For years 4-8 we will take the same test but leave it open for the children's answers. We would expect achievement to be shown mainly in the context of their year strand. For children to show mastery it should be clear that their understanding of their year level work is linked to some of the main concepts we want them to understand (above).

These are our second comparative results for the Sacrament strand. As we are tracking over three years we are tracking the year 1-6 cohorts of 2014.

Our results at this stage show that all groups have exceeded their two year projection, over one year.
We also look together as a staff at the children who need to be targeted following our assessment of the strand. These children are looked at by the whole staff at the beginning of strand meetings so we are aware of the children who have gaps and can support them in their learning.
As teachers we are all live long learners and this term and 5 of our teaching staff are studying towards a diploma in RE (Through the Catholic Institute of New Zealand). Our current paper is on Understanding Sacraments with Father Patrick Bridgman. We are gaining a deeper understanding of the Sacraments and can implement our new learning into our teaching.