Based on recent comments to this blog, it seems that it’s the time of year that many of us are teaching Le Petit Prince. While I shared my communicative materials for teaching in this post, I did not include the performance-based assessments that I use at that time. As some of you have mentioned, I also felt a need to assess my students while reading the novel, in order to be able to regularly record performance-based scores in my gradebook. Therefore, my colleague and I created a series of three performance-based assessments to accompany the novel. Here’s a quick description of each:
Assessment #1: In order to introduce my students to the author of the novel, I had them both read a biography about Saint Exupéry and watch a video about this life. The students answered English comprehension questions about the video and multiple choice French questions (to replicate the AP exam) for the article. After the first nine chapters, I added an interpersonal task (in the form of a role-play) and presentational writing task in which the students wrote an essay about one of the quotes.
Assessment #2: After chapter 16 I gave another performance-based assessment. For the listening task, the students answered AP-style multiple choice questions on three videos about the Little Prince Amusement park. For the reading task, they read an article about the publication of the novel and answered AP-style questions. The reading and writing tasks again included role-plays and essays about quotes.
Assessment #3: At the end of the novel, I gave a final performance-based assessment. For the reading task, the students read an article (p. 1, p. 2) from Psychologies magazine and completed a series AP-style questions. For the listening task, the watched the movie trailer and a news broadcast about the 70th anniversary of the novel. For the written task they wrote about a pair of quotations, and the interpersonal task was again a role-play.
Although I know I’ll tweak these assessments before using them next year (my mixed class requires an A/B curriculum), I thought that they might provide a starting point for those of you who are designing assessments to accompany the novel.
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