Camp Write-a-Lot STAAR Writing Test Prep & Review

Test, test, test, blah, blah, blah. It seems like that's all we hear this time of year. Underline your evidence. Mark out unlikely choices. Check your bubbles. Blah, blah, blah. Tests are boring. There's no way around it.
 

We don't have much wiggle room when it comes to giving state-mandated tests, but we do have a choice in how we prepare for them! Last year, my teachers and I talked about this during PLC and decided we wanted an engaging, stress-free review for kids.
 

That's why I put together this camping-themed Texas State Writing test prep and review to help students get ready for their big writing test in a fun and engaging way. It's also important to help reduce kids' (and your!) stress about the big day of the test.
 

Kids love (and remember)  hands-on, interactive activities that require them to figure things out and actively apply their learning. I wanted to balance that with making sure that they had practice in the important areas they'd be tested on. 

Setting the Scene

Some teachers decorated the hallways or their classrooms with cute butcher paper cut-outs of trees, rivers, and bushes. Wearing a cap or visor and a whistle adds a little camping-themed fun to the day! I'd also recommend reading aloud a fun camping book, such as A Camping Spree with Mr. Magee to get your day started in a camping frame of mind!

Moving Through the Stations

We did our test prep review the day before our big test. We took the whole day and used it to go through some fun, hands-on writing stations! Every student got a fun paper bracelet with an image for each station on it. As they completed a station, we used a hole puncher to mark them!

Another easy way to record the stations is with a punch card, or a signature card. Other teachers in the grade level used these cute badges to show which stations the kids had completed. As they finished the station, they colored in the icon on the badge and they glued it on their badge sheet. (My personal preference was the bracelet :)

If you have a group of teachers who'd like to do this fun activity with you, you can each take a station and have kids move from class-to-class to accomplish them. If not, it's just as fun in your own classroom!

Camping Stations!

We had ten engaging stations to get through on our fun camp day. These are some of my favorites!

Sentence Sort

 

One skill that's necessary for both revision and editing is being able to identify complete sentences, run-ons, and fragments. I recorded a ton of each of these phrases and sentences on sentence strips and had kids sort them into those three categories. 

In the complete sentence category, I tried to include simple, compound, and complex sentences so students had practice in reviewing each of those sentence types. 

     

Revision Station

 

For this station, I wrote several boring compositions on chart paper. I tried to do a lot of the things kids do that make their writing uninteresting: repeating lines and words, having little development, unoriginal details. 

Students were tasked to revise the composition using more interesting details and sentences. They were challenged to use the skills they had learned all year to make this piece of writing engaging and convincing to the reader. 

As you can see, this piece is still under construction, but students have begun to think about using different types of sentences and specific language. 

     

Editing Station

Do your kids love using dry-erase markers? Mine always do! For this editing station, I wrote sentences on sentence strips. In each sentence there was one specific error, whether it was spelling, capitalization, punctuation, or grammar. I laminated the sentence strips and had students use dry-erase markers to make the corrections to each sentence. Bonus points if you have kids sort the sentences by the error afterward: capitalization, spelling, grammar, or punctuation?

  

Using Transitions 

One area that students often need practice in is using transitions meaningfully. I decided this was important enough to merit its own station!

For this station, I wrote a couple compositions on chart paper, but I left out the transitional phrases, instead marking a blank line where they belonged. I wrote the missing phrases (and a few extra ones) on some sentence strips. 

The kids worked in partners to figure out which sentence strips belonged in the composition to improve the flow! They used a little piece of tape to stick them on. You could also laminate the chart paper to re-use next year, or for the next group!

   

Build-a-Composition

In this station, kids have to engage a lot of different revision skills to create a composition out of sentences. This can easily be written on sentence strips, but I typed this one out and cut it up so we could do it in a small group setting with teacher support.  I wanted to use this as an opportunity to review and apply the revision language we'd been using during our writing lessons!

Kids figured out the organization of the composition and then sequenced the details in an order that made sense. This station might be my favorite because it requires so many skills!

 

These are just a few of the fun stations we used to review and get ready for our big STAAR Writing test. It was a fun day, even though the stressful test was on its way! We can't change the test, but we can change the way we prepare for it!

Want to grab a freebie from this resource? Enter your email address for a freebie sent right to your inbox! You'll also get some great writing tips and resources!

What's the best part of all these stations? They can easily be made with markers, sentence strips, chart paper, and dry-erase markers! But if you're looking for a ready-made Camp Write-a-Lot, look no further! Get these stations and more at my TPT store! And now it's updated to reflect the new 2019 TEKS!

  Pin It

Mentor Sentences: Grammar, Word Choice & More

Do you ever read your students' writing and go, "Ummm... I am pretty sure there are some sentences in here somewhere." 

I do that all the time.

Without reading it aloud and imagining the way the child speaks, sometimes there's really no telling what they're trying to say.

We know grammar matters. It matters because, without it, your reader has no clue what your message is.

Like a grandma reading a teenager's text messages,  they will be lost and confused. 

And this is often what I am when I look at fourth graders' writing. Unfortunately, they've been 'learning' about nouns, verbs, periods, and capitals for five years of their lives with basically no evidence to support this claim.

So we needed to take some drastic measures. Enter: Mentor Sentences.

Mentor sentences are models. Just like a mentor text, they basically show us how it's done.

To help my kids learn about a complete sentence, I wrote a simple sentence with lots of parts of speech. I wanted them to really understand what the subject was (who or what the sentence is about) and what the predicate was (what the subject does or is).

Day One

The first mentor sentence I introduced was "The terrifying tornado spun ferociously through the tiny town."

I read the sentence aloud, slowly, and asked the kids to visualize it. Why was it a great sentence? What did the author do to make it a great sentence? We recorded our noticings on the chart. We noticed things like how descriptive the sentence was and how the writer used some strong word choice.

Then we dissected it: We identified the subject and the predicate and marked them in red and green.

In their notebooks, the kids glued the sentence and marked up the subject and predicate, and the questions that would help them find those parts of a sentence.

Day Two

I gave each student a little table to glue into their notebooks. Each column was labeled with a different part of speech and there was a little space above it. 

A strategy that has helped my students identify parts of speech is questioning. Each part of speech answers a question in a simple sentence.

Nouns: who, what?

Adjectives: What kind, how many?

Verbs: Did what, is what?

Adverbs: How?

Prepositional Phrases: Where?

These questions aren't foolproof, but they are a great place to start!

Day Three

To help kids apply what they were learning about parts of speech and subjects and predicates, we practiced dividing up some run-on sentences. We marked the subject of each sentence in red and the predicate in green. Noticing when the new subject was introduced helped kids realize when sentence were run-ons. 

I don't love workbooks, but we used a workbook page and colored pencils to practice identifying subjects, predicates, and complete sentences, and we continued to build a common language for talking about writing.

Day Four

The fourth day was super fun. I gave a little baggie to each pair of kids. I'd recorded the sentence on a sentence strip and cut it into individual words. Holding my timer aloft, I said, "You have thirty seconds to build our mentor sentence!" 

Their hands flew and the cards were shuffled like mad. They did it, every last kid!

Then I asked them to separate the subject from the predicate. They separated "The terrifying tornado" from "spun ferociously through the tiny town."

We spent a minute or two reviewing parts of speech: Point to the noun in the subject. Point to the adjective that describes the noun. What word shows the action the noun did? The verb! Find the verb. Point to the adverb that explains how the verb was done. Point to the prepositional phrase that answers the question, "where?"

And then we manipulated the sentence. This was tricky. The first thing that the kids did to make a new sentence was that they switched "ferociously" and "terrifying". This resulted in:  "The ferociously tornado spun terrifying through the tiny town." This, of course, brought about a conversation about the difference between adjectives and adverbs and which words they can describe or modify.

Then they tried, "The tiny tornado spun ferociously through the terrifying town," which was pretty funny. At first, many of them seemed to think it was ok. I had them close their eyes and visualize as I read the sentence. When the giggles began, I knew they got it. We discussed how simply flipping words wasn't a great way to revise a sentence. You need to flip phrases.

Because this was the first time, I suggested trying, "Through the tiny town," at the beginning of the sentence. Then I asked them to try, "Ferociously," at the beginning of the sentence, too. They started to realize that adverbs can go in various places around the sentence, and prepositional phrases can, too. This creates more interesting sentences. 

 We charted our revised sentences on our anchor chart.

Day Five 

The last day, we used the mentor sentence to write a modeled sentence. We chose a noun: volcano (by popular consent). I asked the questions to build a sentence around the word volcano.

As the kids came up with words, I challenged them to replace ordinary words (big) with specific and interesting word choice, and this is what we came up with:

Who or what?  (Noun) Volcano.
What kind? (Adjective) Dangerous.
Did what? (Verb) Rumbled.
How? (Adverb) Violently.
Where? (Prepositional Phrase) In the middle of the town.

Whole sentence: The dangerous volcano rumbled violently in the middle of the town.

It was awesome! The kids were excited to try their own, so I asked the questions slowly so they could choose their own noun and craft their own sentence. It was so much fun. 


Have you used mentor sentences in the classroom? How has it worked for you?

Want to get started? Grab my Mentor Sentences Grammar Notebook Units from TpT! The best part? They're all aligned to the new TEKS! Every tested conventions TEK is covered, from grammar, to capitalization, to punctuation, to spelling, to author's craft! Check them out on TpT!

 

Pin It