Strategies and Testing

I will go ahead and start off this blog with the fact that I am horribly slow and have just acquired my copy of Readacide and have begun reading it...yeah, it's not like that took forever.  So I am double timing what I have learned so far and will be working on "catching up."  But I'd like to focus on something that I found a connection to in the classroom recently.  This past week, I was required to give a pre-test for my students and according to my TWS it had to be between 10-15 multiple choice questions.

I shuddered at the instructions and come to find out, my students did as well.

I personally loathe MC tests because of the fact that there is only ONE right answer out of four.  I am a very verbal person and love to explain things.  I like to give my reasons of why something is right or wrong and have it graded upon my textual evidence.  In other words, I like short answers.  And while my seventh graders loved the shorter tests and no writing involvement, their attitude quickly changed when they discovered how poorly they did on the MC tests.  They wanted to revert back to writing immediately.

Just thought that it was interesting that the first chapter in Readacide accurately reflected my students in the classroom.


As for this week, it's been the week of strategies.  It's been rather difficult for my own unit plan to be implemented this week because of the undegrad senior ELA student teacher who had to teach HER unit plan this week.  Not that it's a bad thing that she is teaching, but it was very difficult for TWO ELA teachers to implement lesson plans in the same week and the same time frame.  So we collaborated and needless to say, we both got our jobs done.

I introduced my students this week to the ideas of character sketches and graphic organizers. They loved the idea!  But the thing I was the most impressed that the students caught onto was the Cornell Note Taking method we learned recently in class.  When I told the students that they would be using "short hand" to take notes, I saw their eyes light up.  They loved the idea of the bullet points and the chart.  It actually had them closely paying attention to their text and I had more questions than I had ever had before about vocabulary, scenes, and dialogue in our book.  I was very impressed at the success level of the chart.

Has anyone else tried this method next?  I'm thinking next week we are going to implement "mini" word walls that the students can take with them.  Kind of like little tri-fold pocket word walls (saw the idea on someone else's blog) because the students need something to help with their vocabulary words.

Any ideas of what strategies work best with this and vocabulary word walls in general?  Also, I seem to be running out of ideas for strategies, haha! What books should I turn to next?! Could be that I am just running on empty with only 56 days left of grad school...