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!

 
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Writing Better Beginnings for Personal Narratives

Not too long ago, I had to write a script for our holiday program at school. 

"Me?" I asked. "You want ME to direct the Christmas play?"

Yes, they said. Because we don't want to anymore.

Hee-hee. That's how we get suckered, right?

Anyway, the point is that, before I wrote my play, I took a look at a few others. I asked the person who wrote last year's play if I could take a look at it and make sure I was on the right track. I thought about how the play had worked before, what went well, and how I could ensure that would happen again.

Basically, I looked to the experts.

That's what we want our kids to do when they write, too.  We want them to look to the experts to figure out what they did and how they did it, so they can use that inspiration in their own writing. It's called "Reading like a writer" and it's an important focus of our campus writing approach.

It starts with getting your mindset ready to read like a writer. We built this little anchor chart with kids - what do you think about when you're reading like a reader, and what do you think about when you're reading like a writer?

This requires a lot of modeling at first. Kids really need to think carefully about this mind shift! It's tricky to move from simply understanding and connecting to analyzing and thinking about, "What did the author do here? Why did they do it? How did they do it?"

We used this approach recently as we helped kids understand how authors begin their narratives. Starting with a few experts (Kevin Henkes, Jane Yolen, and Patricia Polacco), we analyzed the beginnings of their stories.

Using this chart, we looked for the kind of beginning (Character description, setting description, and dialogue), what kind of details the author included in the beginning (usually who, when, where, and sometimes what is happening), and we critically analyzed to figure out why the author used that type of beginning.

This is the most difficulty part - understanding why an author would choose to write in the way he or she did. What is the impact on the reader? What are they trying to help us feel or see?

In their notebooks, kids had a typed-up copy of the beginning so they could annotate it as well and color-code it for "who", "when", "where", and sometimes "what".

And then we tried it! We decided to try out a setting description and brainstormed the kinds of details we could use our five senses to discover on a soccer field. We spent some time generating the language so we could use it to collaboratively write our beginning.

And then we tried it out! Not my best work, honestly, (I mean, who likes to start with "one summer evening?!") but, as I always tell the kids, I can go back and revise when I've had some time to think of a more interesting idea. We start by getting it on paper, and we can - and should - always improve it. 

Then kids tried their own in their notebooks.

 What are your favorite mentor texts for narrative writing? Read more about our school's mentor text baskets here!

Want a step-by-step approach with everything you need to teach narrative beginnings (including lesson plans, printables, and writing prompts)? Check out my Narrative Writing Minilessons: Good Beginnings resource on TpT!

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Scaffolding expository writing for struggling writers

Do you have kids who are trying to write well but struggle with keeping their writing focused and
organized? They start out writing about their favorite sport, baseball, and end up writing about how their hamster got stuck under the sink? Or their sentences are out of order, creating a disorganized mess?

I've worked with these students every year of my career - I think all of us have! I'd like to share with you the approach that's working for my kids.

For these students, I tried a differentiated approach to writing expository pieces. It's highly structured (you might say formulaic) approach. To be clear: I don't like to teach students a formula for writing! It's not real; they can do so much better with consistent instruction.

But to support those students who were significantly behind and struggled with simple sentence structure, organization, and coherence of their writing, I wanted to provide them with a very guided structure so their writing would make sense.

Because that's really what it is - when writing doesn't make sense to the reader, it's frustrating to the writer and they really don't know how to revise it. It's better to start with a scaffold before your writers get so frustrated. It's meeting their instructional needs through differentiation! (I wouldn't recommend doing this with all your kids! That would be limiting your stronger writers.)

Setting a purpose for writing

First, we read the prompt. I have kids flip the prompt to write a topic statement that their whole piece will be about. We leave a blank so they can generate ideas to write about and fill it in later. I start with the topic statement so we stay focused! Example: My favorite season is _______________.

Generating ideas

Then, kids write a quicklist of all the ideas they can think of to write about. It's important to stretch their thinking - if they only think of one possible idea, they're stuck writing about that. Also, we're not doing much to grow their writing abilities if they write one idea and we accept it. We have to push for fluency of ideas! My quicklist included the four seasons: winter, spring, summer, and fall/autumn.

After that, we choose the one they'd like to write about (one they have the most to say about) and put it in the blank. That's the completed topic statement. My favorite season is spring! (I say that now, because I'm done with winter and ready for spring. Two months into spring, I'll be thinking, "When will it be summer already?!" And thirty seconds into summer, I'll be ready for fall. In the fall, I'll say, "Winter is my FAVORITE season!" I'm always excited for the start of the next season!

Kids put their topic in the middle of a donut map. Around the edges, they brainstorm any details they can think of related to that topic! Then, they use colored pencils (or in a testing situation, we use symbols) to bundle the ideas into like groups. For example, in my brainstorming donut, I came up with "gardening," "rain," "sun," "shorts," etc. Then, I bundled them into two main reasons: "I can garden in the sun," and "I can wear my favorite outfits." Brilliant, I know. It's not my most riveting piece, ok?

Students choose their strongest two reasons to move on to the planning stage.

Getting organized

After we have 2 main reasons (I keep it focused on a couple. I'd rather kids develop 2 reasons well rather than stringing along 5 ideas they don't have the time or energy to develop), we start our expository organizer. They build the 4-square organizer, including the sentence starters for each piece to help them stay focused and organized. This is what it looks like:

We fill in the 2 main reasons we came up with in the "Reasons" column. Then we go back to the introduction.

The introduction is a question. It can start with question words such as, "Do you-," "Can you think of-," or "Is there-." Then we plug the topic statement into the line under the question line. After they master this simple introduction, you can jazz it up by reading about the ideas here.

After that, students add in the details: why the reason is important to them, and an example for each reason.

At the end, students fill in the blank conclusion line by flipping the topic statement: In conclusion, spring is my favorite season.

Here's another sample where I wrote about my favorite place:

And this is how a student applied it to her own prewriting & planning:

After we plan, we turn our plan into a four-paragraph draft. It's a start to a basic piece for students who are struggling with writing simple expository pieces. Try it out and let me know how it goes!

To guide students to deeper revision of their writing, check out my Expository Revision Guides on TPT, or watch this handy dandy video to learn about how to support kids in revising their writing!

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Mentor texts for each grade level* Freebie!

What's the most important teaching tool we have? Aside from your brains, it's books! We can do without handouts, copy machines, scented markers (although who would want to?) and even - gasp - post-its. But books are a necessity for authentic instruction. We learn from the greats. One of the first questions we ask when planning every reading & writing lesson should be "Which books show this in action? Which books can we use to engage students in observing this skill or strategy?"

One of the biggest undertakings my school has ventured into is aligning our use of mentor texts for reading and writing experiences. To support teachers and grade levels as a whole in doing this, and to help our collaborative planning, I decided to put together a collection of books for each grade level.

I was so excited to embark on this idea! I searched high and low for mentor text lists, lists of authors with titles under their belt, and recommendations from other teacher-authors, bloggers, and colleagues. I scoured the internet, high and low.

Why was this so difficult? Because my district, and therefore my school, is dual language. We believe in supporting the child's home language (in our area this is primarily Spanish) by following a specific model of language acquisition. This means the majority of literacy instruction in K-2 is in Spanish in our bilingual rooms, and then we increase English language arts in third, until in fourth and fifth we are teaching in English all day (except for Social Studies).

In order to make sure all of our kids had equal opportunity, and our teachers had equal support, I had to find authors and titles that were available in English and Spanish, or with equitable substitutes. This is tough. The trend is currently to move back into 100% English instruction, so Spanish titles are often off-the-market. We had to buy many of them from Amazon because Barnes & Noble (and other booksellers) no longer carries them.

But I finally figured out the authors and titles to use for each grade. The books were delivered a little at a time from different vendors over the summer. When I arrived, I had a pile of boxes in my room. I sorted them into grade levels and added a sticker on the front of each book noting the genre and grade level. Then I put a sticker on the inside cover of each book to give teachers a place to make notes about reading and writing lessons.

I set up the bins in the library and sorted all of the books - one set for each teacher and a master set to keep in my planning room so we'd have one to use during PLC.

During inservice, I provided a little training to teachers about using mentor texts and then I had my Oprah moment! Each teacher received his/her basket, labeled and tidy, to take back with them.

During PLC, we pull out the mentor text basket for their grade level as we plan for reading lessons and writing lessons! 

In case you're undertaking a similar initiative, I pulled together everything that I used for our mentor text project. The stickers, basket labels, and all the titles & authors that I used are there! Grab it from Google Drive!

Happy Teaching!

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Growing Writers with Mentor Texts: Mud! *Freebie!

  This month, the Reading Crew is celebrating spring! It's a fun link-up featuring a variety of mentor texts related to spring and a great freebie to go with each one. Check out all the posts and collect the mystery words from every post! Then use them to enter the Rafflecopter to win an Amazon giftcard and buy your own copies of the books!   There are two link-ups: K-2, and 3-5. Each has its own Rafflecopter, set of words, and great ideas. Happy Reading!  

Mud is a beautifully written book, perfect for growing students' writing language! Mary Lyn Ray uses vivid figurative language to describe the transition in seasons, from winter to spring. The word choice and sentence variety are incredible, and it's appropriate for all levels in elementary. 

It's simple enough to be enjoyed by any kindergartener, and complex enough to be emulated by any fifth grader. 

To begin the lesson, before you read a single page, introduce the idea of reading like writers. Writers choose their words carefully; they have a purpose for everything they do. As you read Mud together, you'll want to notice all of the beautiful language that Mary Lyn Ray uses to help the reader feel and visualize the changing of the seasons, resulting in mud.

 This resource (freebie, yay!) will guide you through the four main steps you'll use to have students notice, name, explain, and try figurative language in their own writing. 

They'll notice the language with you, help you build an anchor chart recording the figurative language you noticed, and participate in a discussion about why the author chose to use that language. These steps will work with ANY mentor text!

 

The figurative language used in the book includes onomatopoeia, personification, simile, alliteration, and sensory details.

Lines such as, "A cold, sweet smell rises from the ground, like sap in the snow," are beautiful and students will notice something special is happening! 

Every line is interesting, which makes this a great book for discussing beautiful lines.

After you've noticed the figurative language, named it, explained it, and charted it, you'll use the included graphic organizer to brainstorm figurative language to use in your own writing and model writing a descriptive paragraph for your students. Then your students will write their own descriptive paragraphs using their own figurative language!

Building in opportunities for students to see the reading-writing
connection in action are an absolute must! This freebie includes a page to help students identify figurative language during their independent or home reading. Noticing is the first step to being a great writer and reader!

 

Grab the freebie on TPT!

This freebie follows the gradual release model. It's a great way to teach new strategies in reading and writing! Get a gradual release freebie and reading resources and tips in your inbox by entering your email address below!     Before you move on to the next post, my mystery word is Mud. [HERE] is the link to the form you can use to keep track of the mystery words at each stop. You'll need them for an entry on the Rafflecopter below.

Rafflecopter for Grade 3-5

March 18-March 25

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thank you for hopping by! Be sure to check out the rest of the great Growing Readers & Writers posts for freebies and fun!

 

An InLinkz Link-up

 

An InLinkz Link-up

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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. I actually purchased a few mentor sentence products on TPT, but they didn't really meet the needs of my kids to the letter, so I decided to make my own.

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? I'm aligning them to the NEW TEKS! The first two nine week units are already aligned to the 2019 TEKS and the next two are on their way!

 

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