→ But!! I also know that many teachers are feeling pressured by outside forces to “get the kids ready” and to “start prepping now” . . . Even though you’ve been teaching the standards and doing the best you can all year long.
That being said, there ARE some engaging ways to review certain skills so you can move the needle for your kiddos while ALSO feeling confident that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, especially when you’ve got pressure from above your pay grade.
→ This month, it’s all about test review / test prep, but NOT in an icky, slimy, time-wasting way.
Join us for the one & only virtual test prep event to help Middle School Reading + Writing Teachers review for “The Test” without feeling like you’re actually reviewing.
Register for the FREE Test Prep Palooza event, or treat yourself with the upgraded Golden Ticket for early access to the sessions plus test review bonus lessons.
During Test Prep Palooza, we’re going deep with the 12 most-often tested concepts covered by (just about) every standardized test, no matter your state requirements. If you’re thinking about ALL the skills and concepts you need to review, and feeling stressed about how to do it all, just cut it down to these 12 topics.
{And really, you may not even need all 12 because six are for reading and six are for writing}
If you teach a grade level that doesn’t test for writing, then save the writing topics for another time and just focus right now on the reading ones.
Six Skills for Test Review – Middle School Reading
- Context Clues
This is where I start if I have very limited time to review or practice ANYTHING. It’s the biggest return on time investment, and more important than “just for a test,” it’s a vocabulary comprehension skill that will serve and empower students across their entire lives. When we read a passage or listen to a podcast, we’re not going to automatically understand every single word or phrase we come across. As adults who are also teachers, we intuitively rely on context clues to help us understand what we read or what we hear. We have an entire session on Day 1 of the Test Prep Palooza event dedicated to context clues as a skill that will serve students well for test reviews. . . But more than that, it’s a skill that they will use their whole lives.
- Academic / Domain-Specific Vocabulary Terms
I’ve had students convey deep understanding of passages and texts we’ve read in class, and yet they shut down or they miss answers to questions simply because they didn’t understand what the question was asking. In other words, they didn’t understand the nuanced phraseology of the “test” question: How does the narrator convey. . . Or Which of the following can the reader infer. . . Words like convey, infer, and a whole host of others aren’t used in everyday reading or speaking. One significant return on time investment during a test review is to spend time helping students understand the type of terms they’ll most likely and most often see in test questions. We don’t want our students to miss a question just because they don’t understand what the question is asking. We’ve dedicated an entire session at Test Prep Palooza to this very topic —> In the form of interactive, engaging games so it doesn’t feel like a test prep review!
- How to Weave Test Prep into Your Regular Lessons
Time! We never have enough time for what we need and want to teach in our Middle School Reading ELA classes. It’s frustrating to have to choose between teaching a novel or reviewing for a standardized test. . . Only what if you didn’t have to make that kind of choice? What if you could actually review for your state’s standardized test while teaching what you really need to teach? What if you could weave the most important reading strategies into what you’re already doing? Game changer. We have a session during Test Prep Palooza about how to do just that. We’ll look at six specific strategies you can use to review for the test without taking away from the engaging lessons you actually want to teach.
- How to Use Escape Rooms to Review Reading Comprehension Skills
Speaking of test prep that doesn’t feel like test prep. . . What if you used an escape room —digital or not, we’ll show you how— to teach the most commonly-tested skills and concepts for reading? Even if you’ve never used an escape room before, or aren’t sure how to get that set up in your class, we’ll show you how! You’ll learn how to make an escape room DIY style, but we’ll also show you a finished product and how it works so you can see the full cycle. The escape rooms we’ll be talking about and sharing at Test Prep Palooza will cover topics like theme, main idea and details, making inferences, using text evidence, vocabulary, author’s purpose, and so many others that we need our students to practice consistently.
- Reading Test Strategies for Struggling Readers and ELL/ESL Students
Look. These standardized tests are hard. They’re fairly long, with many sets of passages and questions that seemingly never end. We know this. So what can we do for our ELL / ESL students, or for other students who struggle with reading but who don’t get official modifications on tests like this? How can we support them and give them tools to do their best, while also empowering them and building their confidence during times of the year where test prep seems to take over everything else? That’s what we’ll dive into during this particular session of Test Prep Palooza.
- Hands-On Analysis Strategies for Fiction and Nonfiction Texts
I LOVE this particular topic, because it combines the need to prepare our students without relying on study guides, worksheets, or old / previously-released tests that’ll exhaust our students (and ourselves) before test day even gets here. One of my favorite hands-on analysis strategies is literally just a dice game. You can create one by looking at your own state standards and considering HOW questions are asked, like HOW they likely appear on these tests (Think about #2 above where those academic domain-specific terms are used). There are six sides to a die, so make a chart that shows each of the six sides of the die with a corresponding standards-based question next to it in the chart. Make the question open-ended so it’ll fit with pretty much anything you’re reading in class. Students play in small groups of 3 – 5 where they can roll the dice, read the question, and together they discuss (and jot down) their answer. It’s interactive, and most importantly, it helps students internalize and own the language of the types of questions they’ll come across on the actual test. During Test Prep Palooza, we have a whole session about strategies like this one, along with giveaways to share with you these editable games and collections so you don’t have to start from scratch yourself.
^Those six reading topics are what we’re deep-diving into for the reading day of Test Prep Palooza, but we also have another day focused on writing.
Join us for the one & only virtual test prep event to help Middle School Reading + Writing Teachers review for “The Test” without feeling like you’re actually reviewing.
Register for the FREE Test Prep Palooza event, or treat yourself with the upgraded Golden Ticket for early access to the sessions plus test review bonus lessons.
