Skip to main content

Test Prep - TDA Writing with Writable


We are within a three week window of our state testing here in South Carolina and the test most teachers are worried about is the writing portion of the ELA test. The ELA test is divided into two days with the writing test on the first day and the reading test on the second day. The writing test has a text dependent analysis question (TDA) which requires a lot of higher order thinking/writing for our students (many of whom are taking it for the first time...on a computer).

I am super sympathetic, having taught writing. That is why I got SUPER EXCITED when I ran across the Writable site at conference in February. The site has a lot of TDA type questions and passages already put together in a format that mimics what students will see in May. It is not an exact match (the site corrects spelling and has a read-to-me option...which they won't see on the state test) but for the most part it is a way to give students the opportunity to see a writing passage on one side and a TDA on the other side for practice purposes.

The site offers a 60 day free trial (which activates as soon as the first student joins your class so you can make an account and look around for a bit to see if it is something you might use). You can use their prompts or (and this is what made me excited) you can make your own. I made several, which I will link below. I love that you can make prompts and then share them with anyone with a link.

Another exciting feature is that you can see revisions. Things that are removed from the first version are highlighted in red and things that are add are highlighted in green.




I have barely scratched the surface of this site...but for test prep practice I am loving it! I made a short overview video (again focusing on test prep ONLY). If you want more detailed training their YouTube channel is a good place to start. 

Here are links to the TDA's I put together on the Writable site:

Mo, Bow Tie Designer - https://app.getwritable.com/p/c4af12bc-7085-4658-bdc4-771aff72cdcc (this has a link to the YouTube video and the text is the transcripts)
Competitive Double Dutch - https://app.getwritable.com/p/cea95d4d-b7b9-4aef-9514-e27aa980f97b (this has a link to the YouTube video and the text is the transcripts) 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Citizen Cards

This project idea came from a monthly challenge put out by Adobe Express. We have the free EDU version deployed in our district and I thought this might be fun to try with a class. I liked that there was a prize element where the students could win a classroom set of hero cards  and it tied in with Digital Citizenship Week (October 17-21).  I teamed up with an elementary technology lab teacher and we decided to try it with one fifth grade class.  We looked over the available templates and decided we liked the layout of the 6-8 template the best (because they had to list advice for staying safe online).  One of the best things about these Adobe monthly challenge templates is that they can be modified. The revised template can then be sent to students via a link or through Google Classroom.  All the templates for this challenge Adobe gives you a sample template with sample wording but we wanted students to come up with their own wording. Neither one of us was ke...

Random Idea - Website Domain Name

For the past two years I have purchased a yearly subscription to a stand alone website (School World) which I love. I did this because our district was using a very nonuser friendly website for its teachers and I was tired of not being able to do what I want with the website they had given me. I got the idea of a separate website from one of my son's teachers who had done the same thing years ago, she used a different teacher website then School World but it was the same principle. The yearly subscription rate for my own website was $35 and was extremely reasonable. I simply provided a link on my district website to my new site. The district did not have a problem with this. Several teachers were doing it. I am one of these "don't ask...don't tell" teachers so even if there was a problem I wasn't going to find out about it :) Last year the rest of the fourth grade team purchased subscriptions to the site as well. We also purchased our own domain names throug...

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.