Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Government?

To help students prepare for an assessment on the services the 3 levels of government provide students worked together in groups of 3 to write songs to the tune of "Head and shoulders, knees, and toes..." only with one level of governement as the focus.  E.G. Fireman, police, and library...municipal, municipal, etc.  They needed to include actions for everything in their songs (pretty funny, especially sewer and water actions!).  They did a great job on these, had a lot of fun with it.  Engagement was high, presentations had accurate information and enthusiastic participants!  This was after doing a tableau activity where they had to demonstrate a government service in their group for the class.  Again they did very well with the activity.

So did these fun engaging activities help them learn the content?  The assessment was a cut and paste quiz where they were given 20 different government services to cut up on one sheet of paper and a 3 column (sp?) chart on another paper, they had to glue the service in the correct level of govt collumn.  I spoke with the class after the assessment about what they thought of the cut and paste quiz format.  The responses was unanimously positive. 
Some of the things they said were: didn't have to but all my energy into remembering the big list, could think about where it belonged, didn't have to do a lot of writing, makes my hand hurt, don't like to write that much (which might lead to reluctance to complete and maybe not a true assessment of what they know).  Could move them around in my hands before gluing to think about where they went, change my mind. 
These comments make me think that we probably got a more accurate measurement of what the students actually knew by removing the writing/memory barriers and increasing the tactile methods for some of our students who respond better to this learning style.
Overall the marks were good.  A few students were not very successful, they were students who often have difficulty academically.  So now to figure out why?  Is it a reading barrier?  This is my suspicion, when these students see a fair bit of text they need to extract meaning from they often "shut down" as they struggle with their reading.  So I think I will re-test them orally to find out if their knowledge is better represented if  it is read to them first one item at a time then they decide which level of governemnt the service described belongs in.