Tips for Overcoming Test Anxiety

Sweaty palms? Check. Racing heart? Check. A bad case of butterflies in the stomach? Check. It must be test time.

Many students struggle with test anxiety, but those feelings of panic and dread can be even worse for your English learners, students with disabilities, and struggling readers who struggle in the classroom. So what can you do to help your students relax and do their best on tests?

New Year's Around the World

I hope all of you are enjoying the holiday season as much as we are at Imagine Learning! I can’t believe how quickly the holidays came this year. In only a few weeks we'll be starting off a brand new decade!

New Year’s traditions are so interesting to me. It’s amazing how one holiday can be celebrated in so many different ways. Every family, country, and culture has unique traditions and customs, and it's a lot of fun to learn about the different ways people ring in the new year.

After School at Imagine Learning Academy

Class is in session. No, we’re not a few months behind in our newsletter topics. Although many schools started regular classes a few months ago, students in Washington, Colorado, and Hawaii are starting something new this month — Imagine Learning Academy. So what is Imagine Learning Academy, and why are we all so excited about it?

Tell Me an ExposiStory: Transitioning from Narrative to Expository Texts

Nothing captures a child’s attention like a good story—if only expository texts could hold the same attention. Starting in the fourth grade, and continuing into adulthood, informational texts are the most prevalent texts your students will encounter. How can you prepare them to comprehend exposition and enjoy the experience?

Oral Reading Records

In the early 1970s, Dr. Marie Clay introduced the idea of oral reading records: While a child reads to you, take note of any words that are omitted, substituted, self-corrected, or cause hesitation. This information, along with the amount of time it takes for the child to complete the task, helps inform a teacher on what strategies students already use.

Though informative and helpful, these records can be difficult to maintain. You don’t often have the time to sit next to every student in the class as he or she reads an entire book. And with “teacher” by their side, tallying mistakes, some students feel enough anxiety to skew their scores.

Bring Difficult Narrative to Life

You wouldn’t give your 4th graders Tolstoy or Dostoevsky to tackle. And why not? They’d be left in the wake of complex sentences and compounds. So how can you avoid putting that same burden on your struggling readers and English Learners (ELs)?

While you may not be giving your ELs War and Peace, the transition from picture books to early readers to chapter books can seem equally daunting. If you’re looking to make difficult narrative more accessible, take a look at these research-based, helpful hints for the whole class.

Go Graphic

Literacy all begins with letters and sounds. But after learning to recognize letters, then words, then phrases, sentences, and even paragraphs, a student’s journey is still far from over. It’s time to make some meaning out of it all. Time for connections. Time to go graphic.

Each of our new forty-four leveled texts come with a graphic organizer, found conveniently in your Level 2 Resource Guide. Graphic organizers teach students not only how to organize ideas but how to find ideas and meaning in the first place. And according to the April 2007 Reading in a Foreign Language article by scholars Xiangying Jiang and William Grabe, graphic organizers are especially helpful for English learners, who struggle with meaning more than their native-speaking counterparts. Check out the type of graphic organizers we use and how you can incorporate them into your curriculum.

1. Compare and Contrast
2. Sequence/Timeline
3. Main Idea and Supporting Detail
4. Information Table
5. Story Map
6. Cause and Effect
7. Problem/Solution

Struggling readers are likely to see the same text structures over and over without even realizing it. Says Jiang and Grabe, "the limited variety of discourse structures and their recurrence across texts enable teachers to provide explicit instruction to students in text structure knowledge, and students, once familiarized with the major textual patterns, can transfer their knowledge across texts and content areas." Graphic organizers make these text patterns more accessible, so students find meaning easier.

Download a sample graphic organizer here: