The Secret Spill
Monday, April 30th, 2012

Nadine Gilkison, fourth grade teacher at South Creek Elementary (Indianapolis, IN), created a new video called The Secret Spill. The video focuses specifically on standardized testing in math. She shares a common-sense approach to help students show what they know on the test. [read more...]

Strategies to Teach Compare-Contrast
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

If someone says "Compare-Contrast," most of us envision the two overlapping circles of a Venn Diagram. But this graphic organizer only separates information between the two circles; which makes it hard to truly compare information between two items. A better alternative is the T-Chart. [read more...]

Assess Independent Reading with a Cloze Activity
Wednesday, December 14th, 2011

Cloze is short for closure. So a cloze activity can bring closure to a reading assignment by assessing how well students understood a passage after reading independently. During a cloze activity, students complete a fill-in-the-blank summary of the passage WITHOUT looking back at the original text. [read more...]

Quick Tip for Multiple-Choice Test Taking
Thursday, April 28th, 2011

Whether your students are taking an End-of-Course Assessment, an SAT or ACT, or your state assessment, there will always be multiple-choice questions on the exam. Here's a simple test-taking tip that might help some of your students. [read more...]

Target Essential Concept Words
Monday, October 25th, 2010

Many teachers have heard my push for core vocabulary within the content areas. This requires creating a list of grade-level specific terms that are high priority for student success in your classroom. This list would include approximately 30 terms/concepts and would receive year-long instruction - not [read more...]

Questions Increase Student Reading Comprehension
Thursday, October 14th, 2010

Questions are a window to students' thinking. They lead children through the discovery of their world. You can tell what students are thinking and focusing on by the questions they ask. You can also tell what they are distracted by, based on the questions they ask. [read more...]

Applying the Principles of Question-Answer-Relationship (QAR)
Tuesday, September 21st, 2010

Teach students to take note of the different types of questions that can be created from a text or graphic. And because the question types are different, determining the answers requires different processes, too. For many students it never occurred to them that there was anything other [read more...]

Incorporate “Answer of the Day” in Your Morning-Work Routine
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

Here’s a great strategy that Linda Settlemyr from South Adams Elementary (Berne, IN) is utilizing based on a poster she purchased from Really Good Stuff. The board is no longer available, but you could implement the strategy without it. Several times a week, she hangs the poster, which reads [read more...]

Content-Area Literacy
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Content-area teachers often cringe when administrators mandate a school improvement goal for content-area writing. And they're right; you can't ask students to write personal narrative essays to explain the lab experiment they just completed in chemistry. But content-area literacy [read more...]

Write Strong 20-Word Summaries
Monday, March 1st, 2010

Teachers want students to do more than just memorize facts in science and dates in social studies. They want their students to do more than just remember information in health or processes in FACS classes. What content area teachers really want is for students to see the bigger [read more...]

Create Simple Summaries with Pyramids
Friday, April 24th, 2009

Main idea asks students to step back from the reading and to identify the gist of what something was about. What's the point? What's the big picture topic? Using the Information Pyramid, students are forced to think more inferentially and not to look for literal answers in the text [read more...]

3-D Study Guides Make Note Taking Fun
Monday, March 23rd, 2009

No matter what age you are teaching, everyone can find a use for a hands-on graphic organizer. After students have been introduced to a concept, the teacher would facilitate the students' construction and application of this three-dimensional organizer. Students can organize their newly [read more...]

Writing from a Different Perspective
Friday, January 9th, 2009

Wilbur Wright (New Castle, IN) fourth grade teachers Josh Richardson and Claudia Jackson are having their students write letters during the study of U.S. History. One class is designated the “colonists”; the other class represents the Native Americans. Applying historical facts they learned in social [read more...]

Require Students to Reference the Text
Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

A large portion of most state standardized tests include students writing an extended-response prompt. This requires students to read a passage and then write to a prompted topic. The bulk of a writer’s score is based on how he supports his thinking with examples and evidence from [read more...]

Adding Variety to Test Review
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

At the end of a semester, many secondary classrooms begin reviewing content for tests and final exams. Jeopardy is a common review game. But have you tried Family Feud, Pyramid, or Millionaire? These spin-offs to popular game shows were outlined in Scholastic Instructor magazine. [read more...]

Picking Partners for Reading, Revising, and More
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Q: How do you keep kids from picking the same partners for reading, revising, etc.? A: Allowing students to select their partners is motivating but often leads to poor choices and/or kids always having the same partners. Consider instilling a management system [read more...]

Lift, Whisper, & Track
Monday, May 19th, 2008

Students don’t always take content area reading and writing as “seriously” as that of language arts. However, to truly comprehend the subject matter, students need to apply strong reader and writer habits in content area reading, too. Here’s a strategy to slow them down. [read more...]

Citing Evidence from the Reading
Monday, May 19th, 2008

Most states target a read-write prompt on standardized tests. This is where students need to write an extended response to a reading passage. The Test Lady requires an essential component for that portion--cite two different examples from the reading to support your thinking. [read more...]

Adding Voice to Content-Area Writing
Thursday, May 15th, 2008

Writer voice shouldn’t be absent from content-area or nonfiction writing, although it often is. To encourage a more descriptive and engaging lead from her students, Claudia Jackson shared a writing sample from Ralph Fletcher’s Teaching the Qualities of Writing. [read more...]