Fun test prep that is rigorous can sometimes be difficult to find. Is this the way your students look at you when you start your test review?
OH NO! This is not what you want to deal with for the next several weeks of reviewing for the state test. I want to share with you FIVE FUN test prep ideas that have worked well with my students. Hopefully you won’t see this look again.
1. Scavenger Hunt with Task Cards
Task cards are one of the easiest ways to review for a test. Buy some task cards that are rigorous enough for your state test. In Texas we take the STAAR test. I have bought these awesome task cards from Watson Works ! They are perfect for reviewing all the TEKS we have learned this year. Click on the picture below to check them out.
With your task cards you can hide them around the classroom or school and have the students go look for each card. My students love doing this! They take a clipboard and work with a buddy going around working out each task card together.
2. Egg Hunt
You can also use those same task cards and fold them up and put in a plastic egg. If they are too large you can shrink them on the copier. Another idea is to take a reading passage and cut out the questions. You can take the questions and put them in an egg. The students can read the passage and then answer the questions they find in the egg. I like doing this activity outside because it gets the kids outside and moving. I let them work together with a buddy to make it more fun. This was a math test prep scavenger hunt. This was definitely one of my FAVORITE days! We got to go outside, everybody was working, and there wasn’t any fighting. They thought I was a rock star! LOL
3. Buddy Passages
Another fun test prep idea is done during my small group time. The other students are doing a buddy passages with a partner. They are given markers, an enlarged passage, and enlarged questions already cut out. The kids read each question and show their strategies on the question with one color of marker and then go to the passage and underline with the same color where they found that answer in the passage. They then put the question next to where they found the answer in the passage.
Even with inferencing questions (which we call brain questions) there is usually somewhere in the text that gave them a clue to that answer. With the questions that they can not go back to the text to find the answer, such as author’s purpose, they put the question above the passage. Even though they are still doing a passage, they have fun because they are working with a buddy, they get to use markers, and the paper is huge!
4. Jenga Review
Using the game Jenga is another way to make the boring test questions fun. I have used this with math review. First I number the Jenga pieces and have a math assessment with that many questions. Next the students are put in teams and 2 students come up at a time to pick a number. Whatever number they pick, I then give them that test question. If they get it right, their team gets a point. If they tower falls, then the game is over and the team with the most points win. There are many ways to use Jenga for test review. Check out Pinterest for more ideas.
5. Jeopardy Review Game
The last fun test prep we do is a Jeopardy style review game. I split the kids into teams of two again and they play against each other answering questions. I have one for reading, math, and writing. They enjoy playing the game and sometimes get very competitive.
If you are interested in these games just click on the pictures below.
I hope some of these ideas help in making your test prep a little more fun for your kids and bearable for you! If you are looking for some fun test prep reading stations, check out this blog post.
If you are looking for some test prep ideas I have several you can check out in my store.
