A Peek at My Week {10-27-13}

Welcome back to another addition of A Peek at My Week!  I don't know about you, but these weekly Peeks seem to come around so quickly!  Seriously, where does the time go?  (I've been told it has something to do with getting older, but I'm SURE that can't be it! :)

This week, we are starting to prepare for that dreaded time of year -- the state test.  Booo.....  It makes absolutely no sense to me why we give our test in the fall, versus in the spring, since the only thing it is really measuring is how much the kids forgot over the summer.  

Source:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/24/a-brief-history-of-pearsons-problems-with-testing/

But I digress...

I feel there is not much that can be done to prepare, aside from review how to fill in circles and erase completely.  I think over-practicing stresses the kids out even more and will backfire on you on test day.  

However, one area we can work on is the writing prompt.  Because I teach writing in a more unstructured writing workshop format, it is important that students get some practice writing to a prompt in a set amount of time (30 minutes).

So we will spend this week doing some controlled writing responses, but also looking at the writing samples from the DPI website that show actual samples of student writing and how it was scored.  By having the students reflect on what worked and what didn't in these samples, hopefully they can apply some of that to their writing.  Wish us luck!