TERRACE BAY — Superior North Catholic District School Board wants to get a jump start on preparing their students to write the EQAO tests this spring.
Recently, they shared a “Good News Story” about what all of their Grade 5 and 6 classes have been busy with these past few months. All of these students have been participating in bi-weekly virtual EQAO sessions with the Board’s Math lead, Karly Baker.
Since January, she has been presenting the students with various mathematical skills and concept lesson and activities, based upon previous EQAO assessments. Baker designed these 45-minute sessions to what SNCDSB describes as, “fast-paced and highly engaging activities, by using a variety of teaching methods.”
Some of the activities Baker used included, Kahoot Vocabulary game, Math picture books, color by number with metric conversions and more. Once each of these sessions were completed by the classes, students and teachers were left with additional “extension activities” and additional learning materials to help students, “Get EQAO Ready”.
EQAO is an agency that works with the Ontario Government’s Ministry of Education, that contributes to the quality and accountability of Ontario’s publicly funded education system for K-12.
EQAO prepares and administers literacy and numeracy testing in all publicly funded schools, specifically the Grade 3 Primary division, Grade 6 Junior Division, Grade 9 Math and the Grade 9 OSSLT, yearly.
It then provides results to each student who writes an assessment with personalized reports in order to help individual student learning, and plan next steps. schools and boards in Ontario are given detailed reports about their student's achievements as well as what EQAO describes as, “contextual, attitudinal and behavioural information from questionnaires, in an online portal tool.” This data is used to help identify strategies and learning goals to improve school programming and classroom instruction.
Baker’s initiative with SNCDSB is one example of how school programming is enhanced in order to help students in her board succeed on the EQAO tests coming this spring.
She began her program in January 2022, when students were asked to create a classroom Math display, with the key concepts covered in her lessons.. Baker believed that starting early to prepare her students would give students more time to prepare, and thus a greater chance to succeed. Baker phrased her perspective in one expression, saying, “the sooner the better.”
EQAO will be administered a bit differently this spring. It will be administered virtually, with some guidelines changing. SNCDSB remains confident that their students will be ready for these changes and the tests.