More Atwell

In Atwell’s In The Middle, there are obviously a lot of things that I can use to help teach my students. Her chapter on Minilessons in the Writing and Reading Workshop section I found to be very useful. I especially liked that she listed “Procedures for Standardized Reading Tests” as a minilesson. This would be a great minilesson to teach in correlation with the Ohio Graduation Test. Atwell says that “students and I look at selections and questions from old state and S.R.A. tests and analyze how they’re constructed. In another minilesson I teach procedures for reading the test passages and answering the questions…” (page 213). She then has procedures for standardized reading tests, the first one being “Read the first couple of sentences, the last couple of sentences, and the questions. This way you’ll have an idea of what you’ll be reading about, plus what you’ll be asked to decide about this passage.” This is a very important tip to give students because it will save them precious time on the OGT.

Some of these tips, like the process of elimination procedure, are things that my teacher Mr. Youel has talked to his classes about in preparing them for the OGT. He always tells them that there are usually two answers to a multiple choice that are completely wrong and can be thrown out immediately, one answer that is close to being correct but that is not quite right, and one answer that is absolutely correct. I think that giving students practice and tips for standardized tests is a wonderful idea because their OGT scores will reflect upon your teaching, which makes it very important that your students perform well.