Preparing for the CMTs

February 13, 2012 | Posted in: Class Updates

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The CMTs are less than one month away, and we are working hard in room 209 to make sure that the students are well prepared for the eight days of testing.  I explained to the kids that we don’t do a lot of “CMT preparation” because all the work we do throughout the year prepares them to be successful on the mastery tests.  However, with so little time left before the tests begin, we (as a grade) are changing how we deliver some of our instruction so we can best meet the kids’ needs.  This week, we are moving away from our reading anthology and are replacing it with shorter passages that are more similar to the styles of passages that kids will encounter on the CMTs.  (We normally expose students to a wide range of texts, long and short, but our goal right now is to focus on the styles that are most common on the CMTs.)  Several students will work with these passages with our intervention teachers so that they can get the benefit of small group support.  I will work on the same activity with the rest of our class during the same time block, so everyone will receive small group instruction on the same content.  We are also continuing our year-long work with various well-regarded texts and are using them to practice different short-answer response tasks.

Our work with writing is also an ongoing process.  Last week, the students broke into small groups and conferenced with a teacher about their recent writing prompts.  We are working on revising those prompts.  The students are currently writing focused, detailed adaptations of Vera B. Williams’s award winning book A Chair for My Mother.  This is giving the kids important practice with focusing on key events and on providing meaningful detail to develop their work.

Our new math unit focuses on fractions and will give the kids needed skills for the CMTs.  We are also working on a review packet that includes topics from about 10 different skill areas (called “strands”) that were weak areas for the students on the CMTs in recent years.  (We revise this packet each year so that it focuses on the skills that were the weakest for students in the prior year’s testing.)  We complete this packet together, often in small groups, to make sure that students are able to ask questions about any skills that are challenging for them and so that I (or other group leaders) can notice if a student (or students) seem to be struggling.

Finally, starting this week in the computer lab, students in gr. 4 will work on a program called Putting the Pieces Together: Strategies to “Get Through” the Connecticut Mastery Tests.  This is a program I made a few years ago and instead of teaching academic skills, it focuses on good test-taking strategies and behaviors.  It has models, videos, and gives us an opportunity for us to discuss some of the concerns or anxieties that students may have leading up to the CMTs.