As a reading teacher, I am always looking of ways to enhance my instruction, and to come up with engaging ways for readers to teach reading skills to 6th graders. We all know once January hits, things get really crazy. We have to contend with Telpas calibration, Telpas writing collections, Telpas testing, preparing for state testing. So how do we prepare for state testing usually is cramming test passages after test passage down kids throats. I don't know about you but I feel that is a waste of time and energy. There is a better way!
I can pull test questions from the State test and engage students into a discuss about what they notice. So here is how it works in my class.
First Idea:
Day 1:
1. We lay the questions out and read through them and students work as a table and pull vocabulary that we are unfamiliar with and make an anchor chart of them.
2. We categorize whether the words are Academic vocabulary or Tier 2 vocabulary.
3. They then work together determining if the word a word necessary to answer the question or to understand the questions
4. We then discuss how to determine the meaning of unknown words:
- we talked about using context clues, use the ideas in the text
- we talked about using a Thesaurus and a dictionary (online and textbook)
5. Students by now have narrowed the list down with the help of me guiding them through the questioning. SO they work to create frayer models over the words they still don't know the meaning.
6. We create an anchor chart of representing Tier 2 words and academic words.
Day 2
1. we read through the questions and determine where we could possible find the answer to the text: Using QAR- which I previously taught.
they have a large poster of the QAR chart and they sort their questions. Students are then allowed to walk around and do a gallery walk of their table mates poster and go back and determine if they want to change anything based on their walk.- they put a sticky note on it and explain why they moved it if they did. Teacher checks each table giving feedback.
Day 3
1 We work on identify the reading skills that the questions address. We talk about/review the meaning of those skills we have learned and make an anchor chart of those we haven't addressed.
Day 4
1. We read the questions and work through which question doesn't effectively address the skill the question is asking about.
2. Strategies to answer questions is addressed at this point.
Day 5:
1. We talk about different reading genre and create anchor charts of the characteristics
2. students are then task to work in pairs and read the passage that the questions we have worked on all week and answer the questions.
3. Teacher is doing voice overs to help to scaffold and guide students as they answer, reminding them of strategies.
More great ideas that I have used are:
- Sorting activities,
- Task cards
- Do Now- Staar like question stems
- Create Jeopardy games
- Use Padlet or Booklet
Another great idea is to use the learning targets that have been found to be on most of the old state test and and create lessons specific to the Teks and the question types can be rewritten over a mentor text.
I have create bingo reading response boards around Teks, or use the question stems from a standard test and write questions about a read aloud or reading passage students will be reading independently.
So you see there are so many other ways to prep students for Standardize state test rather than having kids do passage after passage. I feel like doing that harms more then it helps. Kids are so tired of looking at passages they will either excel or fail. In my opinion most kids will get tired and not take the test serious and just skim passages or just mark without reading the questions.
Doing these activities, I feel exposed them to the staar in various ways. The structure, the vocabulary, the questions, and test taking strategies using unconventional tools and activities.
You can use mini passages to teach and practice skills that can be tested,
challenge kids to use vocabulary in sentences and in oral discussions.
I just know heir are more creative ways to practice and set kids up to be prepared for a state exam.
Yes eventually, I expose them to a passage from each genre with the questions and we work through them as a class, in partners and groups, after working a passage for every genre.
The kicker to all this is I start way before the state test date, I hold kids accountable all year, my word walls are up , anchor charts are up, I reteach in small groups. I don't wait until the month before or weeks before the test to start prepping them for the test.
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