Match Maker – Kindergarten Readiness Test #3, Final

Briana is now in her second year of Montessori, which means that next year is KINDERGARTEN - the scary year where my baby becomes a kid. Scary for me at least – she couldn’t be more excited. She even wore a Kindergarten uniform to school on Friday, “just to practice and try to trick people”.  It also means that this December she takes the Kindergarten Readiness Test.

I’ve blogged about that test and what the requirements are before so check out those posts if you want to know more about the state mandated test. Since my last post on the topic I have also talked to Briana’s teacher about it and she told me that there is no way Briana will not be entering Kindergarten next year and that she has no doubt Briana will excel at the test without any additional preparation.

So that’s great and all (and being a proud Mommy, of course I agree), but I figured we’d do one more activity anyway. What’s it going to hurt? So I thought of the thing that I most wanted to reinforce. There turned out to be two: getting multiple tasks at one time and remembering to execute them all, and the letter match up.

Multiple Tasks – How to Make Dinosaur Tracks

On the KRT the kids will be told a two or more part instruction and must execute the parts in order and correctly. The administrator is only allowed to repeat the instructions once. In this case I am assuming that Briana’s vocabulary will be sufficient enough to understand the requests. Other than vocabulary building, and making sure that she is well rested, there’s really not a ton that I can do there.

But I am curious about her abilities and what better way to work on multiple tasks than a science experiment? The kids have been begging to make dinosaur footprints again since we did it the first time, almost a year ago after a friend’s birthday party gave us a kit for favors. The first time I really helped them with the steps and never really explained the steps to them. 

You only need:

Molds

Plaster of Paris (or flour, we used both)

Water

Ziploc bags

I get out the footprint molds, which I washed and saved from the kit. And the tiny measuring cups from the kit. I have the kids lay everything out. Then I tell them to listen carefully because I can only repeat the instructions one time (which is what is said on the KRT).  I say slowly-

There are eight steps.

Step 1 - Pour THREE scoops of the plaster into the opened bag.

Step 2- Pour TWO scoops of water into the opened bag

Step 3- Shake and squish the bag until the stuff inside is all mushy

Step 4- Ask Mommy to cut the side of your bag open

Step 5- Squeeze the stuff into the molds

Step 6- Set the timer for 30 minutes

Step 7- When the timer goes off, ask Mommy to pop out the dinosaur tracks

Step 8- Decorate

Then I tell them to start.

They are chomping at the bit. Briana announces, “Abby, step one is pout three scoops of this stuff in your bag.” Good. They both do. Then there’s some debate about step 2. No one can remember how many scoops of water, though they both remember that water goes in next. I repeat all eight steps in order and remind them that I cannot repeat the steps again.

They remember all of the steps after that. Thankfully. I was worried that they’d forget and then call my bluff on not repeating myself. My kids go along with activities well, but they are still 3 and 4 and if I promised dino footprints and then said oh well we can’t make them…let’s just say I got lucky that time. About forty minutes later we have beautiful dino tracks.

During the 30 minutes we had to wait, both girls want to make more because they didn’t move quite fast enough and each of them has one mold that no one thought would make a good footprint (too dried out before pouring in Bree’s case and not enough mix left in Abby’s case). I ask what they think would make good footprints. Abby comes up with Play-Doh. So we make a couple out of Play-Doh. Those don’t require waiting so the girls were happy, but not satisfied that the process was the same. Then Briana says, “What about cooking stuff?” I got some flour and we did it again. The flour was way too watery using the same recipe and we made a couple of batches until we got a consistency that we liked. I didn’t measure so I can’t tell you what we came up with. Sorry. Just eyeball it like we did. The flour wasn’t dry when the plaster was, so we’re leaving that overnight. It should work. Or maybe we’ll grow mold in our little Petri dish shaped container.  I’ll try to come back and let you know tomorrow.

Psychology Today had a great post a while ago about how you can actually improve your child’s memory.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/radical-teaching/200904/top-10-list-improve-your-childs-memory

Letter Match Up

On the KRT the trickiest task, to me, is that the kids are given an object and told to find another object that starts with the same sound. Both of my girls are pretty good with letter sounds and Bree is getting pretty good at spelling in general (Abby’s 3 and she is working on first letters but not whole words yet). It’s not the identifying letter sounds that I want to let the kids practice- we do that all the time. It is understanding the weirdly worded instructions of finding an object that starts with the same sound as another object.

I’ve wanted to do a fancy version of this activity for a while, but haven’t had time to make the necessary things. What I wanted to do was to print out lots of pictures and tape Velcro on the back and then stick one picture on a cloth board and have the kids stick other words that start with the same letter to that.

Given how crazy time has been as school started these last few days, I ditched that idea for something simpler…and I’m glad I did.

I told the kids to pick one item in the playroom. Bree grabbed a bear and Abby grabbed a slinky. Then I told them to find 4 other objects in the room that start with the same letter.

Here’s Abby thinking hard about her sa-sa-slinky:

Briana quickly collects a bag, baby, book, ball, and herself, Briana to go with the bear.

Abby gets a shirt and the stairs to get with her Slinky but gets frustrated quickly with her letter S. I look around and share her frustration. The best we could do was salad plate from her tea set, and her sister.

Since Abby was frustrated and I always want every activity to end in fun, whether didactic or not, I ask Abby if she can tell me one thing that begins with the same letter as her name. She quickly says “Apps on the iPhone”. I cheer and make a big fuss and with her confidence up she continues “apples, asparagus but that’s yucky, and alphabet”.

Bree wants to do more…which is why I am happy that I didn’t limit us to whatever cutouts I would have created. We do duck-dinosaur-doll-David (from the book No David!)-drawing. Puzzle-pony-plate-princess-prayer, and a few others after I stop writing down what is in the piles.

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So now I’m officially done practicing KRT skills with the kids. They’re on their own. J For the record, I think it’s important to point out that I never tell the kids that what we’re doing has anything to do with a test called the KRT. I think that might stress the girls out, unnecessarily, about the test. Instead I just say, let’s play this game or do this activity, which I do anytime we have an activity actually but I wanted to stress that as it relates to test taking stuff.

Here’s a link to the national KRT site: http://ststesting.com/krt_des.html

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I wrote my first blog on 09/17/10 about 2 years ago and I have actually now done every single activity or covered every topic that I wrote down back then and wanted to make sure my kids know going into the world. That’s pretty cool if I do say so myself!

Don’t worry, that only means that I need to create a new list, not that I am at all done teaching them! If you have any suggestions of what to put on my new list, let me know.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife