Practice Tests

*This post may contain affiliate links. Check out my About page for more info.

We’ve been MIA again and just got super busy with life. This last week we spent everyday doing practice tests. My boys will be taking the Woodcock-Johnson tests at the end of April/early May and I wanted to see where they were at.

We used this book for first grade (affiliate) testing and this one for fifth grade (affiliate). They were pretty straight forward and multiple choice. I ripped the answer sheets out of the back and tried to give them the freedom to go where they felt most comfortable to complete the tests. It took FOREVER, but we completed them by Friday. The only portion that I had them skip was the writing portion. We will be going over that anyways.

These really helped me to see where the boys are. They both need to cover capitalization and punctuation again. I’m working on a lesson plan for that. We already knew we would go over writing again. My first grader did exceptionally well. The only part he really struggled with, and my fifth grader did as well, was when the instructions were different for half of the page and required antonyms instead of synonyms. Neither read the instructions to catch it. I caught it with my first grader. I was reading the instructions to him for a good portion of the test.

My fifth grader has more to work on, but now we know where to focus him. He seems to feel better knowing and we both want the big tests to come out showing that he at least is passing his current grade. Mostly, this is to reassure the family(and world) that we are not screwing up our children. We love learning this way and love the schedule that homeschool allows us to have.

What do you do to prepare your child(ren) for yearly testing?