The Big Test

By Julie Danneberg

Mrs. Hartwell is preparing her class to take the Big Test. As her students grow increasingly anxious about the Big Test, Mrs. Hartwell realizes she has to teach the most valuable test-taking skill of all: learning to relax!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charlesbridge
• Release date: Jul 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781607342991

Book preview

Reviews for The Big Test

[carlathelibrarian · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

With standardized testing happening in most schools around Canada and United States, there is often nervousness and insecurities surrounding these events. This is a great book for teachers to use with their students to help alleviate these feelings. In the story, Mrs. Hartwell takes a week to go over things with her students. She keeps telling them that they have learned a lot over the year and the test is a chance to show what they know. She keeps it low key and positive. When some of the students still become very anxious, she ditches her lesson plan and plans a day to help the students relax before they have to write the test the next day. The illustrations are great and very realistic. The details and colours are great and add to the story. This is a book that should be in every school library and primary classroom.

I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[shazzerwise_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Test anxiety can be a real monkey on your back. I felt it as a child, and I've felt it as an adult. It stinks. What Julie Danneberg's book does it build up a good head of steam, and then releases it in one huge whoosh of relief, something we could all use sometimes. I'd say this is an excellent book to share around testing time, and an excellent lesson in not letting our worry get away from us to carry with us our whole lives.

[sroslund_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mrs. Hartwell’s class (who look to be about fourth- or fifth-graders, but never defined in the book) is getting ready for the big, end-of-the-year test. Mrs. Hartwell is doing everything she can to get her students ready; teaching them how to sit still for long periods of time, showing them how to fill in the circles on test forms, and telling them about eating a healthy breakfast the morning of the test. But nothing she does seems to help with the anxiety that most of the students are feeling; many of them actually ask to go home early throughout the week because they don’t feel well. Julie Danneberg’s, “The Big Test” starts out by trying to be about young children and test-taking, but then falls off the wagon around page 19, when her Mrs. Hartwell literally throws her file labeled “Lesson Plans” in the garbage (which kind of feels like the author throwing out her file labeled “Storyline”). After seeing how upset her class is, the quirky teacher leads them down the hall to the library (where the students panic even more at the prospect of having to go to – ew! – the library. Yikes.) and opens the door to reveal that she has instead set up a kind of play room in which the children are not required to take any test. Logic, common-sense, and actions with consequences be damned. Judy Love’s watercolor and pencil drawings are interesting enough – she provides a lot of detail on each page and reader’s will appreciate her multi-cultural approach to drawing the students even though most of their names are like “Andy” and “Emily”. But her facial expressions start to blur, making it seem as though the class is made up of Jimmy Stuart clones – boys and girls alike. For ages 7-9.