5 Easy Steps to Set Up a Test Prep Power Hour

Kirsten 0:09

This is the social studies teacher podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm curious to the southern teach an educator and mom who is passionate about all things, social studies, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement. So let's dive in together.

It's another Tuesday, and I'm excited to share with you another episode of the creative teacher podcast. This is all about setting up a test prep Power Hour. Now it is coming likely to the time where your state testing is around the corner if it hasn't already. And I know this is in March, and likely, you're already kind of weeks away, if not days away from your state standard. And you might be even on spring break listening to this. But I wanted to kind of give you this to think about for potentially, before your state testing or saving it for next year, just so that you have a strong starting foot in getting ready for test prep season, and saving this episode, sharing it with your colleagues sharing it with a co worker friend about how you can create something called a Power Hour. This was a powerful, no pun intended way to really get our students set up for success. And the way for it to be successful is to have your entire team on board, whether that's three teachers, for teachers, and even interventionist math reading interventionist in general. So while this is not an explicitly Social Studies podcast for this episode, I do think it's important because you're likely an upper elementary teacher listening to this. So I want to make sure that you have those tools as far as if you're teaching your ELA and you're able to set up something so that your students are more prepared for some state tests that you might have. Near the end of the year, we're going to talk about what a Power Hour is and how to set up one and five steps to do so. So it's super easy. As far as logistics, it can be a little bit, depending on how many people you have available to do this. It can be a little bit of work. But in the end, in the long run, it can be very beneficial.

Now I do want to kind of go back into a story of when I was in high school, because this is probably the first experience I had of some type of test prep boot camp. And I want to say it was maybe only a week and I remember the theme being some type of Hawaiian Luau. And we were we were preparing for what was at the time for taxes. It was tax, and we were preparing for the state tax test. And I remember and specifically we were doing in our home rooms. We were in our home rooms. And I remember the whole week we were there just preparing for testing for math and reading and just doing all these different activities. I remember Barry Manilow Copa Cabana and then, of course, you know, The Beach Boys playing because it was a luau theme and they made it fun. It was great it you know, for high school, I remembered it so there's something there. And it was just kind of a engaging way to prep for what's otherwise probably really boring and could be really dry and dull, and just kind of lightening it up a little bit. So that is kind of what I remember in my own personal experience. And then of course on the teacher side. I really enjoyed setting up some power hour and we got to really work in groups. I'm gonna dive a little bit more into what we actually did, but I really enjoyed it. I think the students enjoyed it as well.

You can use a power hour to intentionally help students who need extra support so that they do the best they can on the end of the year exams and state tests. Power Hour is around 60 minutes of purposeful targeted instruction for three to four days a week. This could be done in preparation Shouldn't have a major test or state standardized test. Typically students are reviewing material that already has been taught during the years, this is not something that they're learning something new, they're just kind of reinforcing what they might have already learned, or kind of re investigating re learning some skills as well.

So to set up a grade level Power Hour, the first thing you want to do is decide on a test. Of course, first and foremost, when you decide as a team on some type of pretest, it needs to be the same exact test, it can be a previous released version of the standardized test for your state. For Texas, we always used the star standardized tests from a previous year, they always have the star release tests. And so we would decide on which one we were going to do. And we would do that.

The second step is to review the data and group students, how you review needs to be consistent, and based on scores from the pretest. Taking, after the pretest, we would grade our home rooms, tests. And we also did a pretest, I should say for ELA one free reading, one for math. And we got together and we scored it and we grouped students based on the number of teachers who were available for Power Hour. So we actually did this all in an Excel sheet, it was not like super manual. And it was pretty easy to grade because it was all multiple choice. So because we had five teachers, our thought was to group them into five groups, and we wanted to group them based off of kind of their area of how they scored. And each teacher would take on a certain group, and there would be five different groups, five groups for ELA and five groups for math. Not all students were in the same group. For both subjects, there might be one student who might be really strong in math, and not as strong in reading. So they may be in one group for math and a different group for reading. So I'll explain to you just examples based on my previous years of what we did and how we bucketed them. So our group one would be the students that were unlikely to pass or meet the required standards for the test, we believe that all students should still receive support and meet during power hour. The second group are the students who have the potential to pass. And based on the pretest and other tests throughout the year, they were off by 123 questions. So they were still somebody who may not have passed, but they were super, super, super close, they could with extra support. After Power Hour, the group three or the students who will definitely pass or it will likely passed based on their test results. But they still needed refinement or focus on certain standards. And there was something kind of in common with a lot of them. And there was something that was in common, like they had kind of the same standards, but they likely would pass just based off of their score, our group four would be the students who have the potential to reach the highest tiered level on the test. And while I know states are different for the STAR test in Texas, this would be the masters tier. And so they were off by one to three questions. And they could benefit from focusing on one to two, maybe even three skills. So group four, they're very, very likely to pass, but we wanted them to kind of get bumped up into passing that next tier, the highest tier. And group five would typically be the students who are well above grade level standards. And they may have only missed Zero to Three questions on the assessment. So we did have some students who completely passed like flying colors on the pretest and only missed zero questions or one question. So they would be in that group five. So that is kind of how we would group our students.

The third step is to decide which teachers will take which groups now as I said earlier, we had five groups for math and five groups for ELA. And of course, we all taught different subjects we were departmentalized so there were two teachers who are math and science to teachers who are ELA social studies and one teacher who taught all subjects. We would basically groups, teachers with the students based off have comfort, typically, because we did the power hour for math and reading. And we would just take groups based on how we felt we could best help them. For example, the math teacher would likely work with group two, or group four for math Power Hour, these are the ones that are like on the verge potential to pass potential or get the highest level. So they were really kind of the, you know, we want them to kind of be bumped up a little bit higher get their scores to improve a little higher. So those math teachers would work with groups two, or four but the reading teacher, because group five is very, very, very likely to pass group three is very, very likely to pass, they would likely work with those groups. And of course, it would switch for reading, we have those really high, I don't like saying this, but high stakes groups that they are not quite passing, but they could they're really, really close, the reading teachers would take them because they're the ELA teachers, the math teachers, maybe they're not as comfortable or not as familiar with teaching. Reading, they haven't taught reading for a while, they might work with group five, or group one or group three.

All right, step number four is to create a schedule, decide on how often you want to meet with your groups. The goal is to try to meet with your groups for an hour, three to four times a week for about five to six weeks. This would mean that your regular instructional time would need to be shortened and accommodated. So we did create a revised schedule, so that we could actually spend some time with our groups in the Power Hour, we typically did two days of math in two days of reading, the time of day also dependent on many factors such as when students went to specials, when we did this with our third graders, we did it at the end of the day. So we would have a shortened schedule, and students would pack up early getting ready to dismiss and they would go to their power hour class. And of course, some students would be in their own class because they're just in that group with a teacher that is going to be in for that power hour, so it kind of worked out for them. But then a lot of other students would be going into another classroom for their power hour time. However, when we were in fifth grade, and we were the first to go to specials for the day, we would have our specials and then right after specials, they would go to their power hour for that one hour and go to their regular class and have a shortened schedule.

The fifth step is to have plans and resources decide on the most important skills and standards that need to be re taught or reinforced with each group. Typically, our students who are in group five, would be working on a self paced project or book study. They are the ones again, group five, the ones who are likely going to miss zero to three questions. They're all gravy, we're good. And we just want to kind of extend their learning a little bit more. Students who are in group two to four would be working on skills based on their pre test results. Students in group one would work on important skills that all students should fundamentally know in their grade level. So for example, for reading, that could be main idea in detail. And maybe for math that might be just knowing basic math facts, or multiplication facts and division facts to kind of help them with their testing. As far as who plans the different activities. Typically, if it was the ELA teachers, and they taught the ELA social studies, they're departmentalized, they would be planning all of the groups. So it's something that we took on like a little bit, okay, you can plan for groups one through three, you can plan for groups four, and five. And then the math teachers would plan out the math stuff. So we would be planning based off of what our content that we actually taught. And we would distribute make copies do all the things we needed to for whoever was with that specific group. So let's say that I am a math teacher, and I'm planning for group one through three, I would have activities set up for those five weeks for the days for groups, one, two, and three and distribute them to the teachers for group one, group two and group three. So if that reading teacher who hasn't taught math or doesn't remember, third grade math or fourth grade math, they're going to receive the instructions and the resources for helping those students.

Remember one of the most important rules is to have fun. This is a great way to review everything you learned throughout the year with your students. And if you do it right, and you want to play some Barry Manilow maybe well, maybe not in upper elementary, but you might want to play some fun Beach Boys are just something fun, have a fun theme, students will look forward to power hour, you could have music, play some games, incorporate a theme and so much more make it fun. We had students use dry erase fours as we were practicing math problems. We did some kind of thing where they got to pick, we had all of the different questions in Easter eggs. And somebody got to pick an Easter egg and open it up and we would read the question and we would talk about it together, there were all sorts of things you can do. And we did that just kind of made it a little bit less daunting to practice for test prep.

If you're looking for any type of power, our resource ideas, I do have some in my TPT store that you can utilize for your students. I have reading passage test prep for both fiction and nonfiction and I also have a reading skills graphic organizer bundle. So these are mainly of course for reading. And ELA. The ones I just mentioned are great for groups one through four if you happen to be doing reading, this helps students review and refine their reading skills for fiction and nonfiction. As far as group five, you're likely going to be doing some type of project based learning. So I do have some fun project based learning activities that helps students go beyond reading comprehension and apply their learning in different ways. And that would be the project bundle, which includes create a country project and an invention project. And then there's also a multiple intelligence choice board so they can decide what their multiple intelligences are and create a fun activity or project based off of the prompts. So hopefully you can check those out. And I hope you can try out a power hour if it's not this year.

Definitely try it for next year. Hopefully you have a wonderful rest of your day. I'll talk to you again next week. Thanks for listening to the social studies teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the southern teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode. For more teacher tips and strategies

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