I have always felt very strongly about teaching students skills that they will actually use in the real world and helping them to develop into a wonderfully well-rounded person. Now that I'm a mom of a two year old, my feelings about that have intensified. In teaching young students, my number one goal is creating a literate, thinking person; one who can read and write for a variety of purposes, including enjoyment. Somehow, in our endeavors to reach certain state and national standards we have lost sight of that. Although we have testing standards we have to reach, that must remain the secondary goal for us as we plan instruction. We must first foster a love for reading and writing and develop deep comprehension and thinking in each. After that is established, we can show our students to how the concepts and strategies we have taught them will translate into a test. We can teach them the "test genre", but only after we have established a solid foundation of