Tell Me About It (aka Kindergarten Readiness Test Prep part 1)

A few weeks ago I went to a meeting at the kids’ school about the Kindergarten Readiness Test or KRT.  Apparently this is a mandatory test in Ohio (not sure what other states do it too) that my oldest will need to take next year in order to go into the Kindergarten program at her school.  I’m not super worried about Briana passing the test, not just because I think that Briana is a smart little girl, but also because she goes to a school that has bothered to host a parent meeting on the topic, which leads me to believe that they are doing all that they can to prepare the kids for this test.  That being said, while I don’t believe in drilling my kids, I do believe in preparing them.

So after the meeting I googled the test and soaked up everything I could find out on it.  The best resources were actually on the state site:

http://www.ode.state.oh.us/GD/Templates/Pages/ODE/ODEDetail.aspx?page=3&TopicRelationID=1366&ContentID=3930&Content=117686

Therein they said that the kids are assessed on 6 topics:

1. Answering who, what, when, why, and how questions
2. Sentence repetition (and presumably comprehension although that’s not stated online, our school said their focus is really on story sequencing, in addition to the obligatory rote repetition of sentences)
3. Rhyming identification (do two words rhyme)
4. Rhyming Production
5. Letter identification (both capital and lower case with an emphasis on lower case since most kids learn their capitals first)
6. Letter sounds (this name is deceptive.  The task is not going to be presented to the kids as ‘what sound does the letter M make?’  They are going to be given 4 pictures (an elephant, a mouse, a giraffe, and a lion, for example – totally made up by me example, just so you know) and a target picture (a monkey, for example) and asked to point to the animal whose name begins with the same sound as the target picture.  If your child is not at least familiar with the concept of reading, and more specifically how to separate a word into sounds, this task is going to be much much more difficult for them to even understand.

My kids’ school apparently adds to the core test because their list also included:

    7.  Mathematical Knowledge

    8.  Vocabulary

    9.    Visual Discrimination (or finding a small object in a large picture.  We’ve been doing the iSpy   

         puzzles and books to work on which I highly recommend)

   10.  Direction Comprehension

   11.  Emotional Readiness (which is assessed more day-to-day than in the test)

Since the list is obviously way too big to tackle in one day, I’m going to break them down into singular tasks and work on them sporadically until next winter when Bree is tested (actually until the year after’s winter when Abby is tested, but I digress).  Today we’re going to have fun with sentence comprehension.

SEQUENCE THE STORY

Before we can talk about sentence comprehension, we need to know what a sentence is.  So, of course, parts of a sentence are not on the KRT test, even at our school, but I think it’s important anyway.

After naps I sit the kids down in the office and let them cut out some pictures that I printed off of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  The nouns were: monster, dinosaur, girl, boy, dog, cat, apple, and ball.  The verbs were: kicks, eats, kisses, hugs, tickles, and hurts.  The adjectives were: angry, surprised, sad, and happy.  Here are the templates I printed if you want to print them yourself-

While we worked on cutting along the lines (which incidentally was done much better than I expected and no pictures were lost), I talk about how a verb is an action word.  We shouted our verbs – bangs, screams, jumps, cuts, etc. – and on occasion act them out.  Then I tell them that whatever does the action is the noun – Mommy, Briana, Abigail.  Finally I say that if we describe the person it is called an adjective, for example “The gorgeous Mommy explains.”  If we described the verb it would be called an adverb, for example, “Briana perfectly cuts.” 

When I’m sure that the kids understand those four parts of the sentence, we sort all of the things that we have cut out into noun, verb, or adjective. 

Then we take turns building sentences.  Our sad cat hurts.  Our angry apple kicks.  Most importantly, my happy kiddies learn…and have fun along the way.  The first few sentences took a while, but once they got it they were “trading nouns” and then verbs and adjectives and cracking up at the new sentences.

The kids want to add objects of the verb to the sentences so Abby adds a ball to the sentence “The frustrated monster kicks” and Briana adds the girl to the end of the sentence “the surprised boy hugs”.

As with anything with toddlers, then we get silly and the surprised boy hugs a girl who kicks a monster eating an apple.  But hey, that’s exactly how you build a sentence.

TELL THE STORY FROM THE PICTURES

Talk to my kids for more than one minute and I promise that they will talk your head off about whatever story crosses their minds at that moment, so I know that they can string a story together (and we worked on that in the TV time blog too), but I wanted to work on their ability to understand a story without being given any words.  One of the preparatory activities that the school recommended was to use pictures to have our kids tell stories to us.

After we looked at and told our stories, I grabbed a stack of stories that were out of order and spread them out on the floor.  I told Briana, first, to put the story in order and talk about why.  I’m big on ‘talk about why’.  I think that her thought process is more important really than the end result.  This was harder than I expected it to be and Briana was frustrated that the four pictures (a bird with a twig, a bird with a next, a bird sitting on her eggs in a nest, and a bird looking at a worm) were not easily comprehended as a story.  I then helped out without doing it for her by telling her to describe each picture.  As she described what was happening in each picture she began to understand that the bird first got a twig and then built a nest and then “got pregnant” and then laid eggs.  The bird and the worm took a while and then Briana decided that the bird’s eggs hatched and they said “tweet tweet, we’re so hungry Momma” so the Mommy bird went to get a “snail” for them to eat.  “But not the whole thing!  You can’t eat the face part!”  And just like that we’d sorted a story.

Abby’s version was modified because she’s two.  Or it was going to be.  I was going to give her a “secret bag with a secret object in it” and have her tell the story of the object (in this case a figurine of a gingerbread man sitting on a candy cane that we somehow have).  My Abigail, however, was not going to be patronized.  She wanted to “do a story puzzle. Not a bag!”  Luckily I printed two stories so that Briana could choose one, so Abby got the other.  Abby wasn’t at all sure what to do with a story that would have been about an elephant having a dream about being a chef, then working hard at a car wash to make money, then saving the money, and then opening a food truck.  She did a decent job though, taking in all four pictures as a whole and saying “The elephant got a dirty truck and took it to a car wash.  All clean.  The End.”  I accepted it and congratulated her even though she didn’t actually sort the pictures or describe all four.  I probably shouldn’t have though, because in hindsight she was asking to be challenged and I let her off easy.  Oh well, we’ll do it again.  Sorry, Abby.  Mommy is working on letting you grow up and treating you like a bigger kid.  Kind-of.  Really I want to swaddle her back up in a pink fluffy blanket and rock her to sleep, but that’s a whole other issue ;) 

In case you want them, here are the pics we used for the story creation:

 

I’m sure we’ll do more KRT related things over the course of the year, so I’ll try to mark them as such in the blog title.

Happy New Years!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife