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.