Trickle Up: How Primary Teachers Can Pave the Way to Language Arts/Literacy Assessment Success in the Upper Grades

                                            Dawn Rise Graham

Life was pretty good in grades K to 2 in my district.

Over the years, for budgetary reasons mostly, standardized testing had been eliminated in the lower grades.  So as a second (and occasionally first) grade teacher, I was feeling pah-ri-tee good.  No hurries.  No worries.  At least in a testing sort of way.  I could simply teach the given curriculum.  Until the day I realized my dear friend of 20-plus years, the third grade teacher, was very distraught.  It was the first year of the 3^rd grade ASK test. 

Guilt!  How could I be so happy, doing the dance of no-testing joy, while one of my best friends was bearing this bureaucratic burden?  Before I knew it, the words were coming out of my mouth.  “How can I help to make it easier for you when they get to third grade?”  She showed me a sample writing prompt.  It was no more than a picture and some instructions.  Definitely not what I was doing during my writers’ workshop.  “So… they have to write about the picture?”  That seems like such a dumb question now, when picture prompts are such a part of the lingo.  She also enlightened me as to how the rubric worked:  Points off for wandering off the topic.  Points off for starting sentence after sentence with the same words.  Things that, in second grade, I had been lax to criticize.  After all, if they knew where to put their capitals and periods and used fairly good spelling…heck, we were cookin’ with gas!

So, back to the guilt.  What could I do?  It was about this time that I had discovered really good writing frames.  Not those story webs, but the ones that organize thoughts, characters, and events in order to keep students from diverting from the topic.  My favorite remains the Four Square, but there are others.  I began to gently work my students through the various stages of difficulty: not straying from the topic sentence, adding details and connecting words, writing wrap-up sentences, and never, EVER starting sentences with the same words.  Was this still writers’ workshop?  Of course, but just with clearer goals in mind.  Ones which would take seed now, and hopefully prove themselves valuable around, let’s say, March of next year. Did my students feel tortured?  Not in the least. In fact, let me tell you: those kids took the ball and ran with it.  I, along with other colleagues, began to preach the benefits of such frames to anyone in the district who would listen. 

It also occurred to me, always being desperate for centers in first grade, to add a picture prompt center.  Honestly, I got most of my pictures from People Magazine.  My favorites are the weird, wacky, and humorous: the little girl howling along with her dog, the minivan flying to the moon, the man driving a boat made from an old airliner, the Samoan natives covered in tattoos looking ready for a fight.  I cut to remove any words, glue them to oak tag, and run them through the laminator.  They are stored in a basket with simple directions:  Write what is happening in the picture, or of what the picture reminds you, or make up a story to go with the picture.  Write as much as you can. Give it a title.  They love it. 

We’re into a few years of this, and the upper grade teachers are seeing results.  It’s much easier for them to move forward in their writing program and achieve test proficiency because of what we’re all now doing in the lower grades. 

Don’t get me wrong – life’s still good in the land of no testing (Do I tempt fate?).  But I feel that, with these tweaks in the writing program, we are acclimating our students for the road ahead.