Prompts in honor of the Royal Wedding...

So my daughter came home from school today and told me that she would need to wear her best dress to school tomorrow.  Her teacher is asking all of the students to dress up for the Royal Wedding.  In order to take advantage of this occasion, I put up a few prompts that could be used to keep the students'...or teacher's...interest.

2010-2011 NJASK Information from the Dept. of Ed.

With the test quickly approaching, I thought that I would share the information that the state has provided for what to expect on this year's test.  First of all, the dates would be May 3-6 for Grades 6-8 and May 9-13 for Grades 3-5.

Below the cut, I will briefly explain what the students should expect in the upcoming weeks, according to the NJDoE.

Back to the Blog

Wow, after reading recent comments and looking at traffic on this blog, I was surprised how many other teachers and parents were using this resource.  Looking through the various comments, I've decided to go back to adding additional content.  Let me know what I can add...hopefully I can make this increasingly useful the the teaching community.

Personal Experiences

Hello again everyone.  I see that the number of  visitors has greatly increased in the past few months.  Looking at these numbers, I was thinking that it may be useful for us all to share our experiences teaching the various prompts (persuasive, speculative, and now expository).  Starting a dialogue about what we are working could definitely prove benificial.  I'm sure that there are stories and tips from educators across the grade levels that we could all make use of.  If you'd like to join the discussion, click onto the title of this post and leave a comment at the bottom.

Pete

New year...new test

I was plesantly surprised this morning to see a comment sent to this page which had been idle for the past few months.  It seems that with the new year the state felt the need to gift us with some pretty drastic changes to the ask test.  Last year we were given the speculative and this year our new present is the explanatory prompt.  I will do my best to gather new examples of this prompt and please comment with any that you have used in your classes.

I sent an e-mail to the state last week asking if 6-8 should prepare for speculative prompts.  The answer was that though it does not state that they will be on there, they reserve the right to change this up to the day of the test.  Also, had a workshop on the test last week at Rowan (which was wonderful if you are looking for one) and I will post some of the info up here after I get a chance to look it over.

Hello fellow parents and teachers!

My name is Pete Dolcy and I happen to teach Seventh Grade Language Arts in South Jersey. As many of you well know, the state has thrown us a curve ball and changed the writing prompts on the NJASK test. As such, I have noticed on various webpages that many of us teachers are scrambling to find any examples of speculative prompts that we can. I thought that using this blog, we may be able to pool our resources and create a database of prompts that could be used across the state. Please click on the comments section and leave any ideas that you may have for prompts and if you feel that this would be useful. I will begin listing the prompts that I receive under the Persuasive or Speculative prompts links. Additionally, any information that I may receive about the ASK test will be listed in future blog entries.

Thanks for your interest and I look forward to hearing from all of you!