prepare, teach, re-teach, re-teach, re-teach...TEST!

Over the past three years of teaching, I have never had to give the CST test or prepare my kiddos to take it. When I was teaching third grade two years ago, the contracted teacher returned just as test prep began, and I was moved into a first grade classroom. Needless to say, I dodged a pressure bullet that was unknown to me. I've always overheard teachers talking about the stress load surrounding the preparations for this test, and about how many concepts they had to reinforce daily, however I never truly understood it until now.

Teaching sixth grade for the past 6 months has not only opened my eyes to new curriculum and behavior challenges, but the difficulty of administrating and preparing for the CST. I want nothing more than for my students to succeed on this exam. Preparing them for this test takes hard work and dedication on the part of the teacher and students. Trying to make 11 and 12 year old kids understand the significance of scoring well on this test has been a challenge in itself.

Since the majority of everything they are being taught is review, most of them feel like they know everything and therefore tune out. However, when given a practice test, their scores prove otherwise. As a wake up call, I explained to the kids that how they score on our quizzes is a reflection of their test talking skills and knowledge of the content, and therefore should be making more of an effort to ask questions, contribute to the lesson and seek ways to apply what they are learning in the classroom to their daily lives.

After a week of test preparations had past, I decided that in order to motivation my students to strive for better, my teaching style needed some altering. They were no longer responding enthusiastically to group collaboration or direct instruction. Naturally, lecturing and hearing my voice for 7 hours can be a bore to anyone. So, with a new mind set, I started playing games and making test prep hours a competition. Through this I learned, many students forgot they were learning test taking strategies and skills and started to become excited to play my "games". Using whiteboards, pointer sticks, a bell, stopwatch, powerpoints and online math materials, review games were created and a CST calender count down was hung on the wall.

Each day we take down the number from the previous day and mentally prepare ourself to take full advantage of the hours we have to learn, prepare, and compete to earn some of the best test scores our school has yet to see. So, with three weeks ahead of us, we are pushing full speed ahead to accomplish what we all know is possible, the very best.