It is assessment season -- how are you preparing your students for their External Assessments?
Here are a few ways you can boost your students' confidence so they can feel good going into the testing season.
1. Group Reviews
Have your students get into small groups of 4-5 students in each group. Give them a topic or unit to focus on for the lesson. Then have them brainstorm all the important details, knowledge, and understanding they have learned about this topic on a piece of paper. Even better: give different groups different topics and have them write their details on a big poster Post-It to adhere to your classroom wall.
2. Bingo
Prepare for this activity by creating a Bingo Board on the computer. Write in details, textual evidence, quotations, etc. in each space of the Bingo Board. Once you have created one board, copy it onto another sheet of paper and re-arrange the details so you create a second board (with the same information, but in different places), make 3-5 boards. Pass out these boards to your students. Call out a topic, title of a text, historical event, etc. and have your students place an X (or to use the boards again--a penny) on the answer that corresponds to your "call out".
3. Challenge Cards
3. Challenge Cards
I do this activity to prepare my students for Paper 2 of the DP Literature / DP L&L EA. You can modify this to work for your own subject.
Have students get into pairs of 2 and write the titles of the works you studied in class on note cards (one work per note card). Then call out different ways to "categorize" the works and have the students compete against the other pairs in class on 1) getting the right answer, and 2) categorizing things the quickest.
Some examples of categories I have used:
The answer matters less than the discussion your students have with each other on WHY they are placing works in a particular order.
Have students get into pairs of 2 and write the titles of the works you studied in class on note cards (one work per note card). Then call out different ways to "categorize" the works and have the students compete against the other pairs in class on 1) getting the right answer, and 2) categorizing things the quickest.
Some examples of categories I have used:
- Put works in chronological order based on publication
- Put works in chronological order based on setting
- Put in order based on protagonist from youngest to oldest
- Put in order from "I wish I had this protagonist's problem" to "I definitely do not want this protagonist's problem"
The answer matters less than the discussion your students have with each other on WHY they are placing works in a particular order.
