Preparing for fall testing

For the next four weeks upper elementary Montessori students will be participating in targeted reading and writing lessons that will help us prepare to take the MEAP assessments in October. These lessons are simply times where we work together on improving our writing skills and practice different reading strategies.

Students will be learning the difference between writing themes and topics. They will practice responding to writing prompts as well as how to score their own writing and the writing of their peers. We will be focus on developing strong central ideas, adding relevant and interesting details, using interesting words and varying our sentence structure.

We will also be practicing several key reading strategies by using each strategy with different stories—both fiction and non-fiction. At parent night, I will point out how you can tell which strategy we have recently learned.

To make these lessons specific for the different grade levels, I will be focused on teaching the 4th and 5th graders. 3rd graders will be working with Mrs. LeClair, while the 1st and 2nd graders will be going to Mrs. Klinger’s and Mrs. Sale’s classes. This is a great way for us to prepare for the MEAP because these state standardized assessments are grade-level specific. Students will only be in these grade level lessons for one hour per day and only during the month of September.

I am excited about these lessons because they will also be the starting point for our writing and reading studies for the school year. Reading and writing don’t begin or end with the MEAP but the timing of the MEAP is why we do these lessons during the month of September. The MEAP is meant to test knowledge learned the previous school year; however, being out of school all summer necessitates September review.

As we complete our math placements students will also jump into the Montessori math curriculum. Beginning next week you will see math worksheets as occasional homework. These worksheets, combined with our daily classroom work, will also be a way that we prepare for the MEAP assessments.

We are having a great week in school; thanks for all you are doing at home to make the transition back to a school schedule.