If you’re reading this blog, you probably already hate standardized exams.

And you probably have to do them anyway.

We have freedom in planning our curriculum here at SLA — but we are as bound to the PSSA as the next Philadelphia school. The question for us is not if, but how.

When I created this unit, I was looking to put more hours into our PSSA reading preparation while still keeping my students’ energy up and not drowning them in practice exams – this was the best solution I could come up with.

The first step was to take apart the machine and show them how it works. The slideshow below, along with the accompanying worksheet linked at the bottom, were our first venture into that.

A lot of the buy in comes from the convenient timing of the SAT test in March, but the deeper push is that these tests are a construction, and we are going to disassemble everything and see that yes, there’s a man behind the curtain, and you can learn to do exactly what he does.