Making test prep personal

Today, for the first time this year, the focus was test prep. The kiddos will take the ACCESS test at the end of this month and it will determine their English class for next year. 

To get them familiar with the test question format, I wanted them to create their own test questions. But ah, test prep is notoriously lifeless. How could I imbue it with some of the energy that surrounds their work and writing in the best of times? 

Before the break we published our debut issue of The Public, a publication of student writing. Today I wanted kids to interact with the physical magazine and see each others' work in print. 

They used white boards to give positive feedback to the writer whose piece they read.

In pairs, they read a particular assigned story aloud. Then we looked at the ACCESS practice test question (boring) to understand the layout of the screen. They then had to create a test question and possible answers from the student writing they did. 

My big takeaway from today: 

--> When I ask them to do something text-based on large paper, I must give them the boxes and numbers to organize their writing. They ended up using notebooks, rulers, folders, to create the boxes that I showed on the model on the board. But it took a lot of time. 


Sample ACCESS question we looked at

My slide showing pairs how to organize their A3 paper

Here are the posters they made - some with my guiding lines, some with their own: 










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