Ramon Readasaurus

Have a few students who think they know everything about Minecraft? Have a STAAR test examination in your students future? Want to engage your students, practice test strategies, and reinforce comprehension all at once? Then you need this pack for you classroom. Shake up test season review by using this passage about Minecraft's creator Markus "Notch" Persson to engage students about one of their favorite topics, the super popular game Minecraft. This passage includes a three page text with

Do you wish your students could review an entire year's worth of Reading instruction in a couple lessons before taking the big STAAR test? I know I did! That's why I created the STAAR Genre Review project! The interactive notes we made during the year I translated into digital files so that we could easily review them all in one folder. The information your students need to practice and review before STAAR is all organized by genre, helping out your visual and tactile learners. This product i

Interactive mnemonics to help your students review a year's worth of vocabulary and genre elements before taking STAAR! No prep for you except making copies and lots of engagement for your students! This folder is a powerful study tool with all the information and academic vocabulary listed by genre as well as reviewing author's purpose for each genre and reviewing important test vocabulary words. Included in this file and tailored for fourth graders is: *Folding Notes: The Fiction 4Q (summar

This package contains a folktale paired with a poem. The folktale is an adaptation using a less common mythical creature: the Norwegian Huldra. It tells the story a stonecutter who wants everything the easy way, and when a Huldra grants that wish again and again, he realizes that true happiness comes from hard work and being himself. **I have included two version of the folktale. One has simplified language for ELL's or struggling readers.** The poem is "Ozymandius" by Shelly. I have adapted

High interest article for 5th grade students to help prepare them for STAAR success. There are lots of opinions about Pokemon Go. This article presents a short description of the game and then weighs the pros and cons of the game. Kids can inform themselves with the facts and then write their own opinions! This pack includes: @ 3 page article about pros and cons of playing "Pokemon Go" @ 12 STAAR questions @ 1 Answer Key, tagged with Texas Standards @ Animated PowerPoint to review answers

This chart is a compilation of all questions stems from all released STAAR tests. Each question stem is sorted by the SE (student expectation) that it is tagged with on the STAAR test. The SE's are sorted by genre, and if your district is still following the scope and sequence of CScope, then each grouping is marked for the six weeks that you teach it in. This is a powerful tool when studied. It can provide insight for you as you begin a new unit by giving you a more specific idea of what each

Do your students need to make inferences in fiction? Then they're going to need to analyze characters! How do we analyze characters? By describing them and how they change--seems obvious, right? But what if your students don't have the vocabulary to describe the way a character acts? How will they demonstrate they made all the mental connections? How will they prove their understanding and ability to infer? Let's teach them what they need to know: character traits vocabulary. Your students nee

Kids and adults love YouTube, but not many know where YouTube came from or how it became the mega website it is today. With this pack, you can practice comprehension strategies to help prepare your class for the STAAR test but do so with an engaging topic that both you and your students will enjoy learning about. This pack includes the 3 page article, 10 STAAR style questions, answer key with standards tagged, and an animated PowerPoint for reviewing the answers. Readability Notes: For on-le

This engaging activity will help you reinforce the abstract concept of paragraph structure with your students. Students will sort popcorn into a logical, well-organized paragraph and strain out the unrelated details. The kinds of sentences addressed are: topic sentence, supporting details, examples and conclusions. This project includes both color and black and white versions. It can be used as a station or done as a project by individual students. It generates great discussion as you help yo

Kids love plays and seem to intuitively understand them better as the format comes closer than any other genre to imitating real life social language. Even so, students need to know the names for and recognize the devices used in the genre of drama in order to speak, write, and answer questions about what they're reading. Help your students quickly acquire the vocabulary related to the genre of drama with the mnemonic: P.L.A.Y.S. This interactive notebooking/window flap book includes: *The o

Use these two worksheets to help your students assess the meaning of media (propaganda) during World War II. The worksheets include a poster from the Allies and a poster from the Axis Powers. Students use critical thinking to determine what the message of the poster is and who and why it was made. Answer keys are included. These worksheets are part of my World War II in a Bombshell unit, so if you want more WWII materials your students will love, be sure to check it out, and if you already o

Help your students know what key devices to look for while reading a persuasive texts by having them think of persuasive writing as a battery. A good battery is useless without power, and so persuasive writing is also useless without being charged with something. But what do authors charge their persuasive texts? AAA batteries of course! Authors want to: *Accomplish a goal *Argue their point *Agreement This handout is for notebooks with a visual to help your students remember, saving the tim

Help your students remember the key devices in biographies/literary nonfiction by having them memorize this mnemonic: PDAS! You can use this folding booklet in an interactive notebook or you can purchase it as part of my STAAR genre review pack, which includes more interactive booklets for reviewing for STAAR Reading 4th and 5th grade tests.

This is a set of memes I made to hang as posters and to pull out when I need to remind students of norms in our class. Students can't stop themselves from reading them! I hung them up as collage on the wall across my classroom as light hearted reminders. Both kids and adults like to stop and read them. I've included the files as .jpg and also two .pdfs in case you'd like to print them all at once without formatting them individually.

This is a data sheet I designed to set goals with my students. Once you have the SE data back from the first round of STAAR testing, you can fill this chart out to help your students understand what their weaknesses and strengths are while preparing for the retake. Optionally, you could fill this out yourself, if it helps you visualize the data better, though I think it's more powerful to do with the students. They really care about how they did on each kind of question. I prefer to give them

This table demonstrates research I conducted after discovering a correlation between student lexile levels given through Istation assessments and their performance on STAAR. With a more than 80% accuracy, if the student's lexile level was above the average Lexile level of the test, the student passed (removing dyslexic students from the group as no accommodation are supplied through Istation's software). Third grade levels fluctuate greatly year to year, but can still be useful in making predi

This table demonstrates research I conducted after discovering a correlation between student lexile levels given through Istation assessments and their performance on STAAR. With a more than 80% accuracy, if the student's lexile level was above the average Lexile level of the test, the student passed (removing dyslexic students from the group as no accommodation are supplied through Istation's software). Fourth grades' yearly Lexile measures are fairly consistent, making predictions and measur

This table demonstrates research I conducted after discovering a correlation between student lexile levels given through Istation assessments and their performance on STAAR. With a more than 80% accuracy, if the student's lexile level was above the average Lexile level of the test, the student passed (removing dyslexic students from the group as no accommodation are supplied through Istation's software). Fifth grade's data is useful in making predictions and measuring students' reading progres

Sentence stems to help set up interactive daily reading for the first six weeks of school. These are fiction, metacognitive, and dictionary based sentence stems.

Modern ideas for parents to help emphasize reading at home.