Gearing up for Standardized Testing (freebies)

I know a lot of you are gearing up for the big state tests.  I'm fortunate that this year I'm teaching 1st and 2nd graders, so I don't have to worry about high stakes testing THIS year.  Who knows what next year will hold though.  

Standardized testing can be so stressful for students (and teachers). Just last week, I found my 4th grade daughter checking the calendar out at 6:45am. Turns out, she was counting the days until standardized testing. Talk about breaking my momma heart. :(

A few years ago, I wrote about this letter that I sent home to my parents.  It's so important for parents to help out during that stressful testing week by being supportive and encouraging at home.  You can get your free copy by clicking on the picture.

A few years ago (you can read about that here), I was spending a lot of time doing test prep with my kids when I realized they were struggling just to read the test questions.  Some of those words are hard to read!  So I went through all of the test prep questions and picked out any of those words that I thought might be tricky, such as italics, paragraph, sidebar, etc., etc.  I made a fun game for my students to practice reading tricky words, and it gave us opportunities to discuss the meaning of those words.

If you downloaded this game a few years ago, you'll want to redownload.  I've updated all of my games so that they have easy to read fonts with no confusing letters.  Just click on the picture to download your free copy.

Good luck to all of those who will start testing soon!

Prepping Struggling Readers for Standardized Testing

Although my students are struggling readers, who are below grade level in their reading ability, they are still required to take the same standardized testing as their gen ed peers.  As we were preparing to take this year's FCAT test, I realized my kiddos were having a difficult time reading the questions.  This is a sample question provided for the new FCAT 2.0 that my 3rd graders took this year:

What is the purpose of the illustration on the second page of the story?

Yikes!  There's some BIG vocabulary words in that question!  I decided to try and treat these types of words like sight words.  The kids needed a lot of exposure to them, so they could easily read the test questions.  They have enough trouble struggling to read the passages as it is.  To help them, I created this game.  You can download it for FREE by clicking on the picture.

Next year, I plan on start playing this game much earlier in the year.  How do you help prepare your struggling readers for the big test?