It’s Almost State-Assessment Testing
Time!
Time to Pluck the low-hanging Fruit
With just a few weeks before we begin high-stakes state
testing, how can teachers most effectively and productively utilize the little
classroom time left to us? Here in
Florida, and I suspect on most Common Core-based assessments, the editing tasks
are ripe and ready to harvest. These
tasks—usually a paragraph or a number of sentences with grammatical, spelling,
or punctuation errors to be corrected—are quick and easy items to instruct and
are most likely to bear results on the test.
By picking up a few points on these relatively easy items, students on
the border between one reading level and
the next higher may be able to make the leap.
The common grammatical errors that students are likely to
see are subject/verb agreement, correct use of relative pronouns (that vs.
who), and incorrect tense shifts. Exotic
punctuation like dashes and colons are likely targets in mechanics. And spelling—well, that’s a bit tougher to
improve quickly, but concentrate on common mistakes like there/they’re/their
and its/it’s.
If you’re looking for quick and cheap (but also effective
and engaging) resources, Feltopia Press offers the first unit of Problem Words—Pronouns and Contractions
for free; this is the first unit in a workbook series on often-confused words
like homonyms and contractions, and comes with a PowerPoint and practice
exercises. You might also want to check
out Advanced Punctuation, a
PowerPoint–based activity that covers colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses,
hyphens, and ellipses.
