This post is late in coming, so let's pretend it's November, okay? Great! Every crisp Thursday in November we kept our doors open for several extra hours as we held our STAAR lock-ins, preparing for the December retest.
We were targeting students that were not a part of an acceleration class or pull-out tutorial. We chose this option based on these facts:
- Kids won't come to teacher tutoring once a week. (We know this because we tried and failed.)
- They also won't come on Saturdays. (We also know this because we tried and failed.)
- They do come to school, so let's work on keeping them there.
Now, Lori and I can't seem to do anything without a theme, so we used old Hollywood as our inspiration to take the drama out of remediation.
In our writing stations, students were shown a brief movie clip that inspired the prompt that they would be working with. Students analyzed iconic movie song lyrics as poetry and completed Short Answer Questions.
Students got movie theater candy in their first session, popcorn in the second, and we finished our time with pizza. Yep, we were bribing them. It's still works for me!
*We have an excellent At-Risk team that made all this possible. They scheduled, contacted, located, followed up, and even served slices of pizza. They totally deserve a standing ovation!
We had so much fun, we forgot to take any pictures. I choose to believe we looked something like this:
This is probably pretty accurate.
But the real winner here is YOU! We've packaged all our materials:
- 3 expository prompts
- 3 persuasive prompts
- 3 reading texts and SAQs
- WWAM poetry analysis stations
- Autograph book cover
It's ready and waiting for it's debut at your upcoming tutorials. Check them out here.
And........
Be sure to check back next week as we start our Relevant Review blogging blitz. Each day we offer a great review strategy that you can implement in your classroom in these days leading up to the test.
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