After a great deal of stress over which test to take, last year we finally decided to go with the Woodcock Johnson test. Since Dude's skills range from a bit under grade level (IMO) to quite a bit higher than grade level, it was hard to figure out how to choose a test that would be the right speed for him. If we choose his grade level we were worried he would get incredibly bored on math that was too easy for him. And get stressed on English questions that were too hard, or science he just hadn't had yet. If we choose any other grade, we had the same kind of problems. Quite frankly I thought a fill in the circle test sounded way boring regardless.
The WJ test is a mostly verbal test that is given by a trained tester. Some sections are written and the same for all students, like a timed math test and a timed reading section. Most of the test begins where the tester thinks it will be relatively easy and progresses to harder questions. Each section stops when the questions seem to hard. It sounded like a good way to find out what he knew, without risking the boredom of a test to easy for him, or the stress of a test half to hard for him.
Turns out Dude enjoyed the experience, and I watched the first run through, I am quite confident the questions progressed naturally to harder questions, I am fairly certain they stopped right around when I knew work would be too hard for him, and the results last year simply confirmed what I knew. He is good at math, decent at reading and terrible at English.
This year he scored AMAZINGLY well. Again great at math, decent at reading, but this time Capitalization and punctuation went from grade 2- grade 9!
Well as his mother I am immensely proud!
But the portion of me that is a 'type A educator' feels we have a few other things to work on.
Last year the tester recommended 'Daily Grams' (link to book and review) to help with his score.
The concept is quite simple, a daily review of grammer, 5 questions a day, one of which is always 'sentence combining'. Something that I thought was rather easy, but turns out he learned a thing or two along the way. The other 4 review basic capitalization, and punctuation, along with parts of speech.
Each page was rather short, the information was easy to find, and best of all to this grammar challenged mother, the answers are in the back of the book!
After a year of completing the 'days' I can honestly say it must have worked, not that he is as careful with all his work as he was on the test. But jumping that high I think can be credited to the 180 'grams'.
Of course you know being a mostly relaxed educator, we didn't do 180 in 180 days, or even in 180 weekdays. It took almost 365 days to finish the book. Regardless it worked.
Now about that type A lady living inside me.....
Well I wont torture you with all that half complains about. Someday I will write a whole blog post about my MTPD (Multiple Teaching Personality Disorder)
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