f the word “assessments” makes your stomach drop a little, you’re not alone.
Assessment season has a reputation in preschool classrooms — and not a great one. Weeks of sitting kids down, working through long skill lists, watching little ones glaze over while you check boxes. It’s exhausting for teachers and boring for students.
But here’s the thing: the problem isn’t assessments themselves. It’s the way most of us have been taught to do them.
Why the Traditional Approach Doesn’t Work
The standard model goes something like this: at the beginning of the year, you assess every student on every end of year skill. Colors, shapes, counting, letters, sounds, rhyming, syllables — all of it, right out of the gate.
And here’s the issue. Most of those skills? Your students don’t have them yet. Not because something is wrong. Because you haven’t taught them yet.
Assessing syllables and letter sounds at the start of the year in most preschool classrooms is, honestly, a waste of time. The data you get back is mostly just a list of things kids don’t know — which you already knew. So you’ve spent weeks testing, your students are burned out, and you’ve walked away with data that doesn’t actually move your teaching forward.
It’s hard to know what to focus on without assessments — that part is absolutely true. But the answer isn’t more testing. It’s smarter testing.
A Better Approach: The Storybook Method
A few years ago I started breaking up assessments differently, and it completely changed how assessment season felt. I call it the Storybook Method, because just like a storybook has a beginning, middle, and end — so can your assessment periods.
Instead of testing every skill multiple times a year, you divide your end of year goals into three focused windows and only assess the skills that belong in each one.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Beginning of year: foundational skills most kids come in with some exposure to, like colors, shapes, and basic counting.
Middle of year: skills you’ve been actively teaching since September that are ready to be checked.
End of year: the harder skills like rhyming, syllables, and letter sounds that you’ve had time to actually teach and reinforce.
When you break it down this way, your assessments get shorter, your data gets more focused, and instead of spending weeks testing you’re spending that time teaching the skills your students actually need.
The Step That Makes It All Work: Re-Assessment
Here’s the piece most teachers skip — and it’s the most important part.
Not every child will be proficient in every skill the first time you assess. That’s normal and expected. But instead of re-testing everything, you only go back and re-assess the missing skills.
If a child couldn’t name all the shapes at the beginning of the year, that tells you exactly what to work on. At mid-year, you re-assess just shapes for that child. Did it click? Is there still a gap? Now you have real, actionable data that guides your instruction instead of just filling a binder.
That’s the difference between assessment as a compliance task and assessment as a teaching tool.
How to Get Started
Ready to try this in your own classroom? Here’s the four-step process:
- Print your end of year goals or current assessment recording sheet and grab three highlighters.
- Sort each skill into beginning, middle, or end of year. Start with easier foundational skills for the beginning, harder skills for the end, and let the middle fill in from what’s left.
- Create your three lists and use only the relevant one during each testing window.
- After each assessment period, note the gaps and build a re-assessment plan for the next window.
That’s it. You’re not doing less — you’re doing it smarter.
And when your data is focused and specific, talking to parents becomes so much easier too. Instead of wading through a long list of skills, you can say clearly: here’s what we worked on, here’s where your child is, here’s what comes next.
Assessment doesn’t have to feel like a season you dread. With the right structure, it becomes one of the most useful tools in your teaching toolkit.
Check out the Lovely Commotion Assessments that follow this process!
