Assessing and Evaluating student learning

My mentor teacher does not tend to give many "tests" and instead focuses on essays and continual responses from students (with a few small quizzes thrown in). In "Assessing and Evaluating Student Learning", there is a section that discusses evaluating journal and blog responses. My personal philosophy is that students tend to dump everything they know on an objective test and then forget it. I would much rather students read the text and then emotionally respond to it before discussing it in a class (kind of like how we are doing this right now). I believe that students gain more skills from journaling/blog posts. Because at the end of the day, I want students to read the texts, but its less about what they read and more about how they read it.
Last year, when I started thinking about what I would like to do for my student teaching lesson, my original idea was to read The Hunger Games with students and have them do a theme journal, where they work with partners to find examples of the theme in each section of reading. Then, at the end of the project, students will write a short paper arguing the theme with the quotations that they have already found. But when I got my class lists, my ISATs, and my diagnostic writing samples, I realized that this might be out of range of my students. I think it would be interesting to conduct that in a future class, but for student teaching, my students need something a little different.