Winning Strategies for Test Taking, Grades 3-8: A Practical Guide for Teaching Test Preparation
About this ebook
—Cheryl Yocum, English Language Arts Consultant
Wayne RESA, MI
"This book makes it easy for teachers to develop units based on their own state tests. By employing the strategies in this book, teachers will level the playing field for all students and make high-stakes test taking a game of knowledge rather than a game of chance."
—Mary McConnell, School Improvement Facilitator
Teach students essential skills for test taking and for lifelong learning!
Winning Strategies for Test Taking provides a practical, three-week unit of test taking skills that makes the most efficient use of classroom time and uses commonsense strategies that are engaging for students in Grades 3–8. The authors′ fun approach raises the appeal of test taking and teaches effective metacognitive skills that transfer beyond the classroom into students′ lives.
Full of reproducible resources such as planning guides, models, examples of think-alouds, annotated state exams, and more, this book shows how to help students excel at different types of test formats, including
- Reading and analyzing texts
- Multiple choice questions
- True-or-false questions
- Constructed response writing
- Writing to a prompt
Meet the demands of high-stakes testing and develop students′ confidence to conquer the challenges of test taking in the classroom and decision making throughout their lives.
About the author
Linda Denstaedt has co-directed the Oakland Writing Project since 2002, where she has also been writer-in-residence for the past two years. Prior to her work for the Oakland Intermediate School District, Denstaedt taught tenth- through twelfth-grade English for 31 years. Denstaedt also taught creative writing, fifth grade, and physical education, and she was both the reading coordinator and the language arts coordinator for the Clarkston Community Schools at different points throughout her career. Since 1996 Denstaedt has been a prolific author of material on literacy and language arts education. She has also presented at over 50 international, national, regional, state, and county consulting workshops.
Judith J. Cova Kelly is currently an independent literacy consultant with experience teaching elementary, middle, and higher education classes. Kelly has presented at national and statewide professional conferences on classroom structure, writer’s workshops, reading comprehension instruction, and statewide assessment training. For the Michigan Department of Education, Kelly sat on a committee to revise grade-level content expectations. She has published one article on literacy in the Language Arts Journal of Michigan and she has another pending publication in the Michigan Reading Journal. In 2004 Kelly wrote and determined the implementation of a state grant for more than $1 million for the Monroe Public Schools.
Kathleen Kryza consults internationally for her company, Infinite Horizons, and also presents nationally for the Bureau of Education and Research (BER). Kryza has more than 20 years experience in motivating and reaching children, educators, and others through her teaching, consulting, coaching, and writing. Her expertise is in working with students in special education, gifted education, alternative education, and multicultural education. She has a master′s degree in special education and is an adjunct professor in special education at the University of Michigan—Dearborn.
