Two Strategies to Review for State Writing Tests in Middle School

 

You know what I do when I have just two weeks left before the state writing test?  

1.  Give An Essay Writing Checkup

Although I have prior essays and other essay work, I need a snapshot of my classes so I can pinpoint some specific skills. 

If I can determine the biggest challenges overall, then I can design reteaching activities to address them.

Click here to learn more about the checkup!

2.  Use Centers

Now that I know what's needed, I will focus on reteaching with centers.  

The centers I made addressed 4 main areas:

Focus

Organization

Support

Conventions

These 4 areas are the main components of our state writing rubric.  

For focus, we look at purpose (the topic), audience (For whom is this writing going to be read by and what kind of language should be used?), and task (Is this meant to be informative or argumentative?)

These centers start with an origin story of the North Star.  According to the story, it came as a result of steadfast focus!

Students then create a foldable so they would be prepared to tackle the 3 centers - one for purpose, one for task, and one for audience.

Then, they go through a center for each of these areas.  They examine texts for purpose and then create a purpose-focused text with sentence strips.  Then they examine texts for the audience and re-write the unfocused text with more appropriate language.  Finally, they examine texts for task and then match prompts with tasks.

For support, students tend to need more practice with seeing how to choose relevant evidence and then how to support that with relevant elaboration/commentary.

In these centers, students work in groups in a kind of competition to build a case for a side of an argument about Stonehenge.

There's an evidence station to sort irrelevant and relevant evidence, a commentary station to explain the evidence, and an opposing claim station where they make a foldable of all kinds of sentence stems and then use them to make their case!

In the end, we vote on which team makes the best argument and declare a winner!  

For organization, that's structure and understanding how to cite evidence, explain evidence (elaboration/commentary), and use transitions.

In these centers, students made a foldable with 10 important words related to organization.  Then they used that foldable as they reviewed and used organizers to see exactly what belongs where in an essay.  Next, they use that information to fill in the blanks on a kind of think-aloud that describes what belongs in an essay.  Then they use some sentence strips to "build" an essay.  Finally, they check that essay against the organizers.

Last but not least are conventions (mechanics).  

Students need

practice with capitalization, punctuation, and complete sentences. 

In these centers, students practice learning what it takes to write a complete sentence, what kinds of words are capitalized, and punctuation basics.

There are foldables to be made so that students have something to "study" before the big day. 

You can make all these centers yourself, or save oodles of time and get them below!

Your students will love the variety of activities and you will love that you can review key areas with ease!

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