Prove It!

It's that time of year again when we start the slow painful process of passeging our students to death. If you're a new teacher--or not a teacher--you may not know what I'm talking about, so let me explain. This is when teachers give students as many passages as they can find that might possibly have some characteristics in common with the state assessments--which are coming up faster than we can believe or control. Everyone hates passages--students hate them, teachers hate them, administrators hate them, parents hate them. (Maybe the people who get paid to write them like them, but they are the only ones.) But we often feel this is a necessary evil because we want our students to "practice" before the real test....
So, if we insist on making our students stare blindly at mundane passages about topics they have absolutely no interest in, the least we can do is let them have a little fun with the answers.  Today, my fifth grade group played a little game called "Prove It!" and it was a hit. It's pretty simple, too. We read a very short passage from Istation entitled, "Exploring Space." Then, the kids answered the four questions at the end of the story, citing their evidence as they did so. After that, I gave them each an answer choice  for the first question, and they had to come to the board and write whether or not their answer choice was correct and how they knew. This was simple, quick, and the kids had fun--because kids like to write on the board. They all went at the same time, too, so no one was sitting back judging handwriting or word choice. We continued this activity with the other four questions, rotating answer choice letters.

This is actual student work from my group today.

Anyone with a white board and dry erase markers (or butcher paper and markers) can do this, and it reinforced the idea to my students that we don't only have to prove the right answer--we have to show why the other answers are wrong as well.  This is difficult for a lot of our kids, but if we don't get them in the habit of disproving answers, they will end up settling on a mediocre answer choice or using "fake proof" to justify the wrong answer.  This is a quick and easy way to get them practicing proofing their answers.
What activities are you using to keep your students engaged and focused in this season of reading passages?