Preparing for State Testing

We just finished our state testing on Friday of last week.  What do you do to prepare for state testing?  I use the typical Jeopardy and Are you Smarter than a fifth graders, but here are some other items that I've created, bought, and thought of over the years...

I made my own Government BINGO cards.  Each card is completely different and the students are mainly reviewing important documents we discussed, amendments, and the amendment process.

On the other side of the same card is an overview of SS for the ENTIRE year!  This is always fun to see kids trying to recall these important events that we've not talked about since the beginning of the school year.

I downloaded these Where Am I Cards and students had fun trying to guess where I was.  Next time, I think I will ask them to point it out on the MAP!!  Here is the link to get these for FREE!!

I started doing these when I taught third grade and I love them, plus the students do too!  Basically, you fold the paper at the bottom up about 2 inches.  You then write three clues about a person and have students guess the Who Am I?  I actually let my students draw names out of bag to get their assigned person.  They then read them to the class and have their classmates guess!  You could do this with Where am I? or even What am I? and do vocabulary words!

Here is the answer, which is written under the 2 inch flap.

In Science, I had created games already for each unit, so we pulled those games out and revisited them.  So what about you, what do you do to make reviewing fun and meaningful?

Conduct Grades with Multiple Classes

I've always been curious about how classrooms that switch handle discipline.

My first year of teaching the other veteran teachers wanted to handle things in their classroom and not worry about what happened in other classes.  I found this very difficult because only 1 conduct grade was given, so what if Bob had a good day in my room and horrible day in the other 3 classes?  Why would Bob get a 100 for that day?

I ended up asking them very nicely to just do a simple checklist system.  I would pass around a clip board and if something happened they could write "t" for talking or "p" for playing and at the end of the day I would know who in my classroom had an off day.  It worked out pretty well. Now when their students came to my room, I had a checklist for them and recorded the same information, but it was for my knowledge and for use on my signed papers or parent conferences.

**Simple form that was passed around with my kids to the other three teachers.

Last year (different school and different teachers) we decided to do a more cohesive system.  We passed around a conduct book, which was a composition notebook.  We would write the names and the problems that we had that day and just pass the notebook around.  At the end of the week we would count the number of times that Bob was in the book and come up with his conduct grade.  The system was consistent, which worked out great in our parent conferences!!

**I did not create this form, it existed in the third grade when I started two school years ago at my current school.  I've made it "cuter" and updated it to fit my needs!  Click the image to go to my TPT store to get this item for FREE!!

Although the book system worked, it took some time to count up the names at the end of the week.  I made a suggestion of using the clipboard method that I had originally created during my first year, but the others said they wanted more room to document.

What ways do you track discipline in your classrooms that switch?  

I would love to hear what others have tried!

Thanks!!

Motivation...

If you are a teacher in Georgia, then you know all about the CRCT!!! For those of you who are unfamiliar, it is our state standardized testing. It is a lengthy and rather intimidating test.

Anywho, my students were tired of hearing about this test and were not motivated to take it next week. That is until I stumbled upon Mr. E The Motivator!!! (I had his information all over my Facebook, but definitely felt a blog should be written.)



This super talented man from Atlanta, Georgia has recorded motivational songs about taking the CRCT. The songs are all to the tune of popular r&b songs that my students are VERY familiar with. Another great thing is that all these songs are FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! (insert Oprah voice here!)

My students enjoyed listening to Mr. E all last week, and will continue to listen to him throughout next week, too.

This man is a genius if you ask me.

EdHeads

I am a fourth grade science teacher who LOVES using technology within my classroom. When I started teaching science I was worried about finding quality games that really enforced the standards, but allowed students to have fun too.

However, I found a TOTALLY AWESOME website! It is called Edheads. It is a free site full of interactive science games! My students played the Simple Machines and Weather game during our computer lab time. Now as a reward they are allowed to play on Edheads in the classroom. Their favorite is the Virtual Knee Surgery. The website offers lessons for the teacher to use prior to students playing the games, and for after the game to reinforce those skills.

Recently, I received an email from Edheads and wanted to share this with my friends. Below you can read the email and see that they are in need of some help! If you can help them in anyway, please do. I would really hate for something to happen to this free website. Thanks!

Hello! Thanks so much for subscribing to the Edheads
email list. We greatly appreciate you joining! We mostly
want to use this to let you know of upcoming things at
Edheads AND to find out what you want from us. Toward that
end, we have hired a marketing company to help us determine
who our users are and what they most want to see in future
activities. However, we need more people to sign up by the
end of April to make that worth our while. We need about
900 more teachers and about 600 more students, parents and
'other' to sign up. So please tell all your friends and
colleagues about us. If you are one of the fabulous
students that signed up, please take a moment to ask your
teacher to sign up - we really need him or her to share
their opinion at the end of this month! They can sign up
on our home page at www.edheads.org. Thanks for your help!

Also, we've run into a bit of a problem with our latest
activity "Stem Cell Heart Repair." We had a cardiologist
helping us, but he moved away from the hospital at which
he was working. So need a new cardiologist to help us by
sharing images from heart catheterizations. If you know of
a cardiologist that might be willing to help, please have
the doctor email us at edheads.org@gmail.com. Thanks again!

Gail Wheatley
Executive Director
Edheads

Edheads.org, P.O. Box 396, Hilliard, OH, 43026