What are some activities or lessons you do with your 3rd grade students to help teach them academic vocabulary that may appear on state tests? Do you make charts, have students locate words, etc? Also, what sort of test teaching strategies do you teach? What strategies or tips really help your students master the art of "bubble testing"? Thanks in advance.
I just posted something about this further down so i copied and pasted it here:
We do that once a week test taking thing....I actually am starting to do it twice week...my school orders special booklets for us: Test Ready (math and language arts) which is good for comprehension and basic computation and modeled after national standards....then we also have special prep books based for our State tests...We also have released test questions for the state website.....
we teach them HOW to take a test, by modeling and helping them practice certain Test Tip strategies.....we have special colored posters to help us, such as Plug and Play, Find the Stinker, Reread, Underline the answers, read the questions first, look for context clues, and etc......the kids get real familiar with the strategies. I say, okay today we are working on this one specific strategy....but after awhile they start to use a variety of them....also sometimes we just use the Test Tips on our regular work (such as if we need to read all the answer choices to fill in the blank)
I also have a Test Tips poster in my room.........
Anyways, we have a "Go for the Green" campaign at our school...All proficient/advanced level kids are green....all basic kids are yellow....all Below Basic and Far Below Basic kids are Red......its like a stop light....usually when we grade these tests we put the color next to how much they missed and stuff...it really motivates them(sometimes i put a color on their tests or even some class assignments) we have colored posters in our rooms to help motivate them too....they seem to understand the color-coded rubic a lot better than letter grades or even numbers...they all know Green means third grade level and where they are supposed to be...yellow means almost there....red means try harder.....
ACADEMIC VOCABULARY: I do this a lot with my class, especially because i have many students who are limited in their English...I teach them academic vocabulary throughout the year, its a lot of Spiral Review..such as if i teach them synonyms/antonyms, thats when I would introduce those academic words...etc...but it's also constantly reviewing those terms with them, so that they remember them....
I also have a list of academic words and I make sure to teach them the different terms, like i said its best to teach the vocabulary with context.....
we are beginning to also go over academic vocabulary on our test prep days...we have a composition book/journal called Test Words....we write the definitions in these books....I sometimes introduce new terms to write down in the books when we come upon them in our test prep booklets. I also keep track of the terms on chart paper..
For academic vocabulary I've been keeping a running list of 'academic language' on a large sheet of chart paper. One set for ELA and another for Math vocabulary. It's actually more like two and a half sheets, and counting, by now! I just list the word and when I use it again, I make a tally mark next to it, just to make my students aware of how often I used it. It's gotten to the point, now where my students, too, use the words and go up to make their tally marks.
You might want to read through previous posts regarding test preparation left on ProTeacher. I made a 'collection' of them as they were made. You can read through them to see if there's anything there you can use.
Do you have more info on the colored posters strategies that you referenced. I would be interested in seeing those. Did you create them or did you purchase them from somewhere?
We made them...each class has one....as in my school...we actually visited another school that was making remarkable test score improvement and they were using that kinda system in their school....we stole the idea..... you can make it out of construction paper....its made with green, yellow, red....and it has the levels marked with lines(advanced down to FBB), it says Go for the Green at the top....we then laminated them.....we mark their placement on their with a variety of things anonymous or numbered cards, stickers, post-its, magnets....whatever works....the kids stick it on in the right place themself..the one in my class just shows where they were last year on the standardized testing, but some teachers actually move the cards by different assessments they take.....Green is 75% or better, yellow is 65 to 74% and red is 64% or lower in my class....
I periodically play jeopardy games with the students using vocabulary they encounter on standardized tests, such as "central idea", antonyms (although I use that in my instruction, too, but for some reason they struggle with it), selection, details, text, expression, etc. I also make a point to use this language in my instruction so it is a part of our literary conversations. I've also encouraged the teachers in the younger grades to use that language, as well, so that they are comfortable with the language of the tests. I HATE teaching to these tests; I think there are better ways to assess the progress of our students; however, we, at this point in time, are stuck with them.
we teach them HOW to take a test, by modeling and helping them practice certain Test Tip strategies.....we have special colored posters to help us, such as Plug and Play, Find the Stinker, Reread, Underline the answers, read the questions first, look for context clues, and etc.
(I hope you come back to read this!!)
I'm excited about sharing your school's idea of 'going for the green', but I'm also interested in the ideas for your strategy posters, "Plug and Play", etc. We teach the strategies, but don't have 'catchy names' for these. If yours are published products, I'm hoping you can post the publisher's name, or... if not, could you please post the text that's on these posters? (Hopefully it's not too wordy.)
Thanks a lot for sharing what your school does! We are looking for new ways to motivate our students since we work in a very low socio-economic community with mostly English Learners. Any information you can add will be greatly appreciated!
02-04-2008, 08:37 PM
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