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Start with the Heart

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Testing, Testing, Testing

My 5th graders that I’m student teaching have been taking state tests last week and this week and we are finally DONE!! It’s been crazy, and we’re all happy they are finished. But before and during testing, we had a lot of reviewing to do, so I thought I’d share about what we did!!

 
The students were placed into groups, and each group was given a historical figure at the time of the Declaration of Independence to research in their book. They had to create a poster for their figure and include personal details, whether they were a patriot or loyalist, and a slogan for them! Then, we made cards with each figure’s name on them and each student had one of the people on their forehead, and they had to ask the people around them yes or no questions to figure out which of the six they were!

In this activity, we made a human timeline of the Revolutionary Era in US History. It started with the colonists moving to America and ended with the Bill of Rights. The students had to remember and think about the causes and effects of their event in relation to everyone else’s events. It was a great review that got them up and moving as well as thinking about the series of events that happened.

What the kids are all doing here is called the Place Value Marathon! I got this idea from Ginger Snaps! She made cards with a six digit number, and twenty task cards, such as “What is the value of the hundreds place?” We set a task card on each desk, and I gave each student a number (some had to use the same number, as we have 24 in the class.) Then, we used a sheet of notebook paper, and had them write their number at the top of the page, and then number the page 1-20. During the marathon, they went to as many tasks as possible, matched the number on the task card to the number on their sheet, and then put the answer to the question in the number on the sheet that matched the number on the card. Whoever got all of the tasks completed (and got them all right) won! We decided you could use this with anything! What a great review idea!

 Another review for math that my cooperating teacher had was to write math concepts on the tops of sheets of paper (see picture 3 above), and then the students had to play musical chairs, and put down something on the paper they land at! It could be information, examples, facts, pictures, anything they knew about that concept. Then we would continue to do it. They couldn’t put the same thing someone else put on a paper either. Our music was a parody video of Tik Tok, that was rewritten for testing by a school in Arkansas!

Students played a spinner game that reviewed
basics, geometry, fractions/decimals, and
multiple operations.
Students played a board game, answering
questions having to do with real-world
integers.
Math Cootie Catchers, reviewing reducing
fractions, factors and multiples, and metric
conversions.
Factor Race! A game where the kids race
against the clock to find all the factors of a
number. But if they get one wrong, they don’t
get any points for that round!
This game is similar to the games we played
as a kid with a partner connecting the dots to
make boxes. Students roll two dice, find the area,
and draw a rectangle with that area on the game
board with their color. They take turns with a
partner. At the end, they count up who has the
most area on the page, and that person wins!

 Our last tests were the math tests, so we would have lots of review time to work with the students. Our review this week was math centers I put together! The students went to all six centers (not shown: Smartboard probability tic tac toe) in the three days we had. Descriptions are in the pictures’ captions.

Hope you can take some of these ideas and use them for your test reviews! We had a lot of fun with these!
Love, Allie