Achievement Assessment Family Night

Last night, our school hosted our first OAA (Ohio Achievement Assessment) Family Night. We were very worried about what our turn out would be and how things would run, but it turned out to be a great success! The idea for our OAA night was to get students and families excited and prepared for our achievement assessments that are coming up in May.  We started planning for our Family Night shortly after the first of the year and decided that we would need to bribe families with food, and the kids with prizes. Our principal used money from a grant that our district received to purchase pizza, pop, paper products as well as prizes for the students in attendance. We tried to publicize the event as much as possible by announcing it each day, and really "talking it up" to the kids. We also sent home flyers and posted them in local businesses.

Our principal had shirts created for us, and we all wore them to school yesterday to promote our event one last time!

As teachers, we decided to do a four station rotation in each grade level, so that students could get test taking strategies in each subject area. We tried to differentiate the different things that we were doing in our classrooms so that families wouldn't be bored to death! Students received color coded tickets when they arrived at the event which told them where to begin their rotations, and included four places for each teacher to punch their ticket. Students had to get their tickets punched at all four stations in order to be eligible for the prize drawings.

In the science department, we decided to put together an OAA Night Jeopardy game for students and their families to play during the science rotation. We used questions from old Ohio Achievement Assessments that are posted on the Ohio Department of Education web-site to create our jeopardy board. I let the students (and siblings if they were in attendance) come to the board to choose the questions, and then we discussed each question and talked about strategies for tackling the question before coming up with an answer. I was worried that I began to ramble at times, but felt that each of my sessions went well overall.

Finally, each teacher gave families something that they could take home to use as a resource. We gave families a few web-sites that they could use at home to help their students and then used an "Easter"ish theme to make them look nice, and included some candy eggs.

Despite a rainy night, we had good participation for our pilot event.  I am guessing we had about 30-40% of our students here with their families.  All of the families were very pleasant and it seemed that everyone had a nice time.  We are definitely looking to make this an annual event!