Entry Card: Pre-Assessment / Warm-up activity

Entry Cards make a great Pre-Assessment or Warm-up activity for lessons. 

Entry Cards, which are also known as Entrance Cards, allow the teacher to see how much prior knowledge the student has at ready to deal with the upcoming lesson. Depending on how your students do on the tests, you may find that you will need to go over concepts from previous lessons before moving into the next lesson.

On an index card or half sheet of paper, have a small number of questions regarding the concepts you want to make sure your students are already familiar with before continuing on to the next lesson. In my case, I wanted to make sure that my students were already familiar with the elements of plot:

1. exposition
2. inciting incident
3. rising action
4. climax
5. falling action
6. resolution/denouement 

So my card read: 

Name and describe to the best of your ability the six elements of plot: 

1. _______________________________________________________ 
2. _______________________________________________________ 
3. _______________________________________________________
4. _______________________________________________________
5. _______________________________________________________
6. _______________________________________________________

On the projector screen, I also had a PowerPoint slide showing the plot diagram to serve as a reminder. 

PowerPoint Slide demonstrating the plot diagram. 

The students should have been familiar with the concepts as we had discussed them in a previous lesson some time ago. For homework, they had also been asked to do a plot diagram for Mark Twain's "A Ghost Story", which we had read for Halloween. I was rather confident that my students would do well. 

However, as I did a walk-around to see how students were faring, I found that they were struggling more than I would have liked. 

You can see from Daniel's answers that though he has a good grasp of exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution, he has forgotten about the inciting incident and falling action. 

Cue the review! 

I had the students switch Entry Cards with a partner and then began going over each of the answers as a class, asking for volunteers to name and describe each element on the plot diagram. 

In order to make sure everyone understood the plot elements, I assigned each pair of students an element (e.g. exposition, inciting incident, ...etc.) to identify and discuss from the story we had just finished. Afterwards, we went over each plot element as a class, each pair announcing their findings to the rest for review. 

One thing I might change for next time is that I might give them the elements and have them just describe them instead of having to identify them from memory first. As we went over the elements, I realized that some of the students knew the function of each element but had merely been having difficulty recalling the specific names of the elements--one student wrote expedition instead of exposition but correctly described the function of the element. 

All in all, I was glad that I had done the Entrance Cards before moving on to my lesson on Edgar Allan Poe. His writings with their somewhat outdated English can be very challenging to students. I can just imagine how frustrated many of them would have been trying to identify plot elements within the more challenging text without having a better grasp on the concepts in the first place. 

So, a reminder to all the teachers out there that Pre-Assessment is a MUST! 

After all, how else will we know that our students are ready to move into the next lesson? 

Source: http://captaind.deviantart.com/art/you-shall-not-pass-7505473

If they are not ready for the next lesson, they shall not pass until we can make sure that they are ready.