High Five! Strategies

When I began my teaching career, I taught middle school social studies. Thankfully, I didn't teach a testing grade level so I never had to worry about the dreaded TAKS test. Two years ago, I made the transition down to 5th grade and with that came an exit level STAAR reading test. As a teacher, I was overwhelmed with all of the "strategies" presented for testing prep and I remembered as a student how difficult it was to recall everything and panic about whether or not I remembered to do all 57 strategies: Read the questions first, read the passage twice, circle vocabulary, read the passage again, write a 3 sentence summary after every paragraph, read the passage again, write your name backwards at the top of the page but only with purple ink and while hopping on one foot. {Well, maybe I exaggerated a bit on a few of them but you get the idea.} I found that my students were more worried about remembering their long list of strategies rather than actually putting those strategies to use. I decided to narrow it down and create an easy and simple way for the students to remember their testing strategies: The High Five! Strategies 

When students get their test, the first thing they do is find a blank space or page to write down "their hand" so that they can refer back to it if they forget what strategies to use. {For some reason, it took a couple of tries before they actually realized that just writing these down didn't mean they were actually using them!}

It's no secret that with the transition from TAKS into STAAR, we saw questions that required more higher order thinking skills. Instead of a question asking "Why is Bob sad?" the question now reads "Based on the passage, the reader can conclude that Bob is sad because..." Strategy #1 is to go straight to the questions, read only the question, figure out what it is asking, and rewrite in a way that is easier to understand. 

Since the questions were rewritten first, we don't have to stop, get frustrated because we don't understand and forgot everything that we just read in our passage while deciphering the questions. 

Strategy #2 is to look for the vocabulary words throughout the passage and use context clues if we do not already know the meaning. This too helps us keep momentum while reading the passage since we are not having to pause and decipher a word.

Strategies #3 and 4 are done together. We read about half of the page then pause for a short summary. Some students will write only a couple of words and some students will write full sentences. Have you ever been reading a book, magazine or newspaper, gone to turn the page and realized you have no idea what you've just read? Your eyes did the reading but your brain didn't do the processing! The point of the half page summary is to catch that before we've read an entire passage. If you can't write a couple of words to summarize what you've just read, then you didn't really read it. Better to catch that mistake now and re-read 3 paragraphs than a two page passage! 

Strategy #5 is to answer and prove questions. Students will prove their answers differently but they know if they can write down where they found the information or explain how they came to that answer, they have a better chance of answering the question correctly. It also helps me to determine where they might have gone wrong in their thought process. I tell them that they are not allowed to turn in a math test without showing their work or their math teacher can't explain what they did wrong. It's the same theory for reading. I can't help them see their mistakes if all they've given me is a blank reading passage with only an answer choice circled. 

The High Five! Strategies are done differently with each student. Some will need to rewrite all the questions, and some will understand them just fine the way they are. Some will need to use context clues to determine all of the vocabulary words in a passage, and some will already know all of those words. Some will write a few words to summarize, and some will write sentences. They each make the strategies their own but it's their roadmap. Their cheat sheet. Their testing aide. Their High Five!