Skip to main content

Quiz Kids


Have you guys seen the McKenna American Girls movie? My kids love it. In the movie poor McKenna fails a test and has to get a tutor or she might have to quit gymnastics. I won’t spoil the ending but there are more twists and my girls both agree that it’s a nail biter. As such, Briana has decided that she wants to take a quiz really really really really badly. She knows she won’t fail, but she just wants to find out what a quiz is like.

Of course she’s taken the Kindergarten Readiness Test, but she doesn’t think that counts as a real quiz. So with school snowed out, we have the perfect opportunity to practice quiz taking. By the way, this is entirely the girls’ idea. I was hoping for the perfect day to sleep in today.

So at 7am on a snow day we start our quizzes.

Each girl gets her own quiz based on what she is working on. We start, by demand, with “a words and letters quiz that requires you to circle stuff like McKenna did”. I ask the girls if they are nervous about their first quiz and Briana says “No. I know I will ace it.” Abby says, “I’m sooo nervous.” And then she shakes to show me how fake nervous she is. McKenna was very nervous and Abby wants to be just like McKenna (minus the bad grades!!)

Briana’s first quiz has two instructions. The first section is to circle the animal word. The second section is to write a story using the listed animals. She aces it.


The story continues onto another page.

Abby’s quiz has three sections. First I write out the alphabet and call out letter names or sounds and she has to cross off the letters as I call them out. Second she has to write a line of capital Gs and a line of lowercase gs. The G is giving Abigail some trouble so she’s started writing her name “ABi” to avoid it. The third section of Abby’s quiz is to write her whole name. She gets ahead of herself and writes her name first. I give her an A instead of an A+ in the end because the G she made in her name was subpar and I grade tough. She snatches her paper from me and exes out her first G and writes a new one so I change her grade to A+.


The kids demand another quiz. I ask them what they want to be quizzed on and they say “seasons!” So we do. I cannot draw so I resort to using Dora stickers to describe the seasons. Here’s Briana’s. I’m happily surprised that she can figure out what season I mean without any help.



When it’s Abby’s turn, she wants a “real math quiz” instead. So I let her tell me the seasons as an oral quiz and she aces it. We move on to math. The girls both get math quizzes where I write down numbers and instruct them to put that many stickers below the number. For Abby the numbers are smaller than for Briana.

Abby’s:



Though this may seem quick, with spelling and reading the instructions, which still takes the girls a while since they sound everything out, and counting out 33 stickers and applying them (and three other numbers for Briana), this takes us most of the morning.

I decide that we’ve exercised our minds enough for one day. There’s snow and it’s time to exercise our bodies…or sled, which is close enough to exercise for me to count it. We didn't take pictures today, but here's a favorite of mine from the last time it snowed.


Happy Snow Day!

<3 Pedigreed Housewife 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gripping Geometry

Both of my kids know their basic shapes (square, triangle, circle) very well.    Briana even knows all of the basic extended shapes (pentagon, octagon, star, oval, rectangle, heart, and diamond).   Abigail gets the extended shapes correct some of the time but not always yet.   I credit the kids’ love of puzzles, specifically the Melissa and Doug puzzle that shouts out each shape’s name in a weird monotone if you put it in the correct space. At this point I think that there is a diminishing return in adding dodecahedron to their vocabulary or splitting the triangle into isosceles and equilateral and the rectangle into a parallelogram and a trapezoid.   That being said I do want to expand on their knowledge of shapes (and spending the day on shapes will reinforce what they already know too).   So this week I will literally expand the shapes for the kids- Squares into cubes Rectangles into boxes or cuboids Circles into cylinders and spheres Triangles into ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spellbound

My kids love the first two Harry Potter books (the only ones they are allowed to read so far). My mother-in-law also loves the Harry Potter books, and this week she was in town and the kids were in Harry Potter heaven. All day long they talked about the things that happened in the books and cast spells. My mother-in-law decided to show the kids how the spells were usually made up of Latin words and the kids were fascinated, so when my inlaws left this morning I decided to keep up the fun and stave off the grandparents-are-gone-cryfest.   T he kids, with my inlaws, had taken spells from Harry Potter and broken them down into their roots.   I ask the kids what spells they wish they could cast. Abby wants to turn someone into a baby. We look up the root of the word baby (I have a dictionary app on my phone and when you search word you can click to get the definition, synonyms, origin, grammar, and “learners” that includes pronunciations, inflections, and common e...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Just A Phase

One of the coolest things in life, no matter how old you are, is watching a magic trick and being completely stupefied as to how it works.   One of the most indulgent things in life, no matter how old you are, is chocolate.   Today I’m combining the two, and using chocolate to demonstrate nature’s great magic trick – phase changes – solids to liquids to gases.   Usually I prep the kids with the ideas we’ll explore the next day before bedtime.   I think that the terminology sinks in a little and the kids have time to start to question things so that we have a more fruitful discussion and experiment the next day.   Last night I was telling Briana before bed that tomorrow we’d be making chocolate lollipops just like her friend Mitchell did for his 3 rd birthday party favors and we’d be looking for how the chocolate can change, based on how hot we make it, from a solid piece of chocolate, to a liquid like hot chocolate, to a gas.   Briana looks up at me an...
Post a Comment
Read more