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

Popular posts from this blog

Rhythm Nation

Can rhythm be taught? I hope so. Both of my kids are very excited about their competitive cheer and competitive hip hop teams, and my youngest added ballet to that recently. The kiddies want to dance; the parents lack the necessary genes. But I firmly believe that talent and ability only change your starting point; hard work, determination, passion, and not letting that starting point stop you determine the finish. If my kids want to be dancers, then dancers they shall be. So, where should a rhythm-less parent start? Googling rhythm activities for kids got me a lot of what their violin (Briana) and piano (Abigail) teachers do - read some sheet music and clap out the beat. We do that, and we do it well. The kids have been in various music classes since about 1 year old, mostly for fun and socialization, and both read music well for their ages. The problem is, the kids are like me. I am a master chair dancer. If you see me dancing in my seat, you might even think I'm quite good (...

Helping Hands Olympics

As the school year starts to come to a close, and we prepare for next year, I’ve been going to many preparatory meetings at the kids’ school about next year.   Of all of the information I was inundated with, one alarming fact, which was actually said offhand in response to a question, stuck out.   Many kids nowadays don’t have the coordination and hand strength to tie their shoes or even to write.   Apparently when we substitute things like climbing trees for video games and written letters for emails, our kids are losing the muscles in their hands.   It was said that most kids by what I think was 3 rd grade don’t have the muscles in their hands to write a multiple page paper at one sitting.   It was also said that most Kindergarteners not only can’t tie their shoes, but have never even been presented with the opportunity to try to tie their shoes in today’s world of slip-ons and Velcro.   That’s really alarming (and sociologically interesting) to me! ...

Electrifying Halloween

My kiddies have discovered the age old joy of running around in socks and then shocking each other. Fun to the kiddies, less so for the mommy. But I'm a good sport and I can get in on the static electricity fun. I tell my kids as we're driving to school to ask around today and come home with a good definition of static electricity. I meant to ask their teachers and maybe the librarian, or look it up in a book, but they came home telling me that none of their friends knew the definition. Abby, never wanting to not know something says that she knows exactly what it is, "when you have electricity and it is static which means it doesn't move." So I tell them that static electricity means a charge that is created by friction. Who knows what friction means? Briana says, "it is a force that stops you from doing stuff." "Like Mommy can be friction if you want to eat all the Halloween candy," adds Abby. So when you walk around in socks on the rug ...