Smith's Safari... Adventures in Teaching!: Oh it's TESTING TIME!

Holy cow BATMAN!

It's testing time already! Where did the year go?

We are in count down mode.... only 6 teaching days until the BIG DAY!

I spent the morning trying to come up with a list of things I am confident they know and what we need to revisit this week. My lesson plans are a list with a ton of sticky notes attached to it! Ha Ha!

For my class, the ELA portion will be much harder than the math. Might it be that I am a better math teacher than ELA.... afraid so!

I made this anchor chart to give them something new to look at this week and hopefully they will remember to do some of these things next week.

Test prep is SO BORING! So I wanted a plan that will keep them engaged.

To help get ready for the reading portion, I have picked a different story to use each day as my read aloud. Each day we are going to focus on the same skills with each book. My kiddos love to write on sticky notes. So I made these charts to use. After we read they will work in groups or with partners to identify their answer and write it down. We will talk about all the answers and evaluate them. The best ones will be left on the chart. Then, one student will be blindfolded and use a pointer to pick the winner! And.... the winner gets a TREAT! Nothing like some candy to keep them working hard!

Here are some of the charts I'm going to use this week:

We can't ever get enough practice with this skill. I'm going to make them write in a complete sentence to get some English skill review in at the same time.

I put some "starters" at the bottom to get them thinking. Towards the end of the week, I'm going to cut off the words and see how we do without them. FINGERS CROSSED!

This is something that we really struggle with. So we are going to do a lot of practicing this week!

I wanted this to be different than the PIE chart that we have in class. We are GREAT at naming the author's purpose, but struggle to find ways to express how the author feels. Hopefully working with these questions will help us get some practice.

Easy as can be, helps us review for the test, and everyone will be engaged!

For math I'm going to do a lot of white board review and some Skittle Math. If you haven't downloaded my Skittle Math Freebie, click right here. The kids love it and work so hard to earn those Skittles!

I'm also going to pull out some math task cards. One of my favorite ones is a set that reviews all of the Common Core math standards. It has 4 questions for each standard.