When Howard Drive fourth grader Christina Villafuerte sat down and faced her mandatory fourth grade writing test, she was encouraged to let her mind wander.

"The test is 45 minutes long. We are supposed to plan for 10 minutes first, but I got something quick," Villafuerte said. Villafuerte who scored a 6, a perfect score, wrote an involved saga about finding thousands of Furbys locked in jail and her attempt to free them.

"I wanted to get a Furby so I was thinking of them and there were a lot of things on my mind," she said.

Villafuerte was born in Miami and has attended Howard Drive since the second grade. Her teacher this year was Connie Washburn.

"Mrs. Washburn taught me everything to get ready for this test. She gave us a lot of practice tests and she would always let us share the good ones," Villafuerte said. "Just to show that she can teach a lot, six kids from our class got between a 5 and a 6 on the test," she said.

The statewide average score on the test is a 3, according to Marisol Diaz, Howard Drive assistant principal.

"In fourth grade we place significant emphasis on holistic writing, we use graphic organizers, we ask the children to elaborate and we give them different ways to plan," she said.

This year, the practice paid off. Out of 23,345 students at 200 schools who took the test in Miami-Dade County, only 535 scored between a 5 and a 6. Eleven of the students were at Howard Drive. The school’s median score of 3.6, well above the county’s average score of 3.1.

"I was pleased to see that the training the students have had and the teacher preparation has paid off with such good results for us as a school and for the individual students," Diaz said.

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