I've been posting some ideas and things I do during the last couple of weeks of school. This is a final exam that I created for my beginning orchestra to go along with the SLO (Student Learning Objective) I have been working on all year. At the beginning of the school year, I gave students a pre-assessment on rhythm to determine their level of ability, then I divided the class into high level learners, middle-level, and lower-level learners. By the end of the school year, I wanted every student in my class to reach proficiency (writing, labeling, and performing) on whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, eighth notes, dotted quarters, and corresponding rests. This final exam helped me to determine their final level of proficiency. In one of my beginning classes, every student passed the test and I was feeling good, but then in my other beginning class, I had 4 or 5 students fail the test and I felt like I failed. I still need to work on differentiation to reach the kids who really struggle. Students worked on this exam while I held a playing test on the rhythms at the bottom of the page. For the playing test, I listened to each student individually and I let them choose 2 out of the 3 rhythms to perform. They were sight-reading these rhythms, but the last students to perform did have an advantage after hearing the rhythms performed previously. This is the 2nd page of the exam. I wanted to be sure that all beginning students knew these basics about fingering and they did very well.