Remarkable Writing Online Practice – RACE Strategy

STAAR ECR Strategies for Writing

The RACE strategy is a helpful tool for organizing and structuring informational writing. RACE stands for Restate the question, Answer the question, Cite evidence, and Explain your answer.

When using the RACE strategy, start by restating the question to ensure clarity and show your understanding of the prompt. Next, provide a clear and concise answer to the question posed. This should directly address the main point of the question.

After that, cite evidence to support your answer. This could be from a text, article, or any other relevant source. Make sure to include specific details to back up your response. Lastly, explain how the evidence you provided supports your answer. This is where you can analyze and interpret the information you presented.

By following the RACE strategy, you can effectively structure your writing and make your arguments more compelling and well-supported. Remember to practice using this strategy to improve your informational writing skills.

Students must take the STAAR test online in Texas!  This is a struggle for several reasons.  However, since this is a requirement for our students, we are working to learn and teach the best strategies so they are confident on testing day. These are a few online RACE practice passages that I’ve used and my students have enjoyed. 

RACE Writing strategy Practice - Black History Month
Ecosystems Science RACE strategy

Integrating subjects across the curriculum is a great way to save time! There is not enough time in the school day to teach each subject and skill independently.  We need to overlap to review various skills.  Writing across the curriculum is an easy way to manage this. This resource reinforces the skills for reading needed to create a constructed response and it also reinforces the science lessons on environment and ecosystems.  When my students work on this, we start with a sheet of notebook paper. We fold it in half two times and write RACE down the side. This is what they use to write their rough draft.  This is good practice for those ECR writing pieces.