Grade 1: Sending Feelings Your Way: Greeting Card Project
Rating: 
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Common Core Standards
Reading Literature
RL.1.4 Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.
RL.1.10 With prompting and support, read prose and poetry of appropriate complexity for grade 1.
Writing
W.1.8 With guidance and support from adults, recall information from experiences or gather information from provided sources to answer a question.
Speaking & Listening
SL1.5 Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions when appropriate to clarify ideas, thoughts, and feelings.
Language
L.1.5 With guidance and support from adults, demonstrate understanding of word relationships and nuances in word meanings.
Description of Assessment
This Grade 1 assessment titled “Sending Feelings Your Way: Greeting Care Project” created by the New Hampshire Task Bank is a curriculum embedded task that takes approximately 7-10 sessions to complete. The greeting card task engages students in reading poetry and learning about feelings. The unit focuses students in: developing their skills in literary analysis, empathy, understanding, and creativity and oral communication. Students read and listen to an array of poems, analyzing feelings conveyed through poems and illustrations both orally and in writing to understand how words and pictures communicate feelings. For the task, students individually think about a person they know who needs a card and why, so that they can choose an appropriate poem. After their first card draft is finished, students complete a planning sheet organizer. Then they create an illustration for the situation, reviewing the planning sheet again, to make any necessary changes to the greeting, before filling in a card reflection sheet. In small groups, students share their cards, telling the person the card was created for, what the specific reason was, and the feeling or emotion that they had tried to communicate. Students then present their cards to the people for whom they were created.
Cautions
Connecticut teachers are cautioned that the task activities assume that students have already developed some guided reading discussion skills as well as writing process skills as they engage in: a close reading of the poems that includes multiple readings for initial understanding, how the poem works, and what it means; writing first and final drafts of analysis to complete the published greeting card project; presenting work in small groups. The materials required for this task are not included in the task materials and will need to be secured. The writers of the task suggest that this work take place at a time in the school year when students know each other well so they can effectively discuss feelings.
Rationale for Selection
This performance task is a good example of an authentic assessment that provides students with multiple opportunities to apply advancing literacy skills as they present ideas and information through writing and/or drawing and speaking experiences. It makes reading texts closely (including read alouds) a central focus of instruction and engages students in reading poetry and learning about feelings. The task includes an aligned rubric and assessment guidelines that elicit direct, observable evidence of the degree to which a student can independently demonstrate foundational skills and targeted grade-level standards.