Mrs. H

Quick Assessment Tips

So, yes, I’m a mom. But before I was a mom, I had another life. I was a teacher. And, I hold a Master’s Degree in Educational Administration, Curriculum, and Supervision – with an emphasis on Curriculum Development and Testing Data Analysis. So all of that training and experience has taught me a thing or two that I’m happy to share with ya’ll.

Have you ever wondered how much your child REALLY knows, but haven’t been able to quantify it or figure out what it means? Hopefully these simple little tips will help.

The best way to do an assessment at home – esp for a toddler – is to make it a game. I’ll be using the alphabet for my example. So get a foam puzzle, or a set of flash cards, or make your own little letter cards, and let your child play with them for a while. Once your child has thoroughly mixed them up, randomly pick up a letter and say, “Hey, what’s this letter?” When you set it back down, you’re going to set it one of two places. If your child got it correct, set it back in front of him or her. If not, pull it out and set it somewhere separate for you to hang onto. Go through all of the letters until your child has had the opportunity to identify (or not) all 26. Save out the ones that were incorrect, and then later on the same day, using a different medium with a different font (for example – a t shirt with letters on it, or a picture book), point to those letters and see if your child knows them then. IF you child knows any of them when asked in a different format/setting, then that is a “sometimes” letter – meaning that sometimes your child recognizes it, and sometimes they don’t. Now, obviously, they could have more “sometimes” letters – that they knew in the medium you showed them the first time, but might not recognize later. That’s ok. But the letters that aren’t recognized the second time around, those are the letters that you want to take note of and chose to focus your time on. For Becca, they are D, G, J, N, T, and Z.

The “sometimes” letters will rear their ugly heads when you least expect it, so it’s good to always be reinforcing letter recognition (or number, shape, color, whatever the skill is that you are assessing and working on) even if your child has already exhibited knowledge in that area. It’s also good once you get into lower case letter recognition that your child see letters in a variety of fonts – especially letters like g, a, and q, which can appear a variety of different ways depending on the font. TRUE recognition comes when your child can identify the letter in ANY font.

Then I recommend keeping this information written down – in a binder, or on a file in Evernote, or wherever you can. This way you can track progress. Do the same assessment in a couple weeks after working on the skill and see if there has been improvement, if you’ve found more “sometimes” letters/numbers/shapes/colors, or what change has occurred. Don’t do these assessments on a day that you know is a bad day for your child – either emotionally, physically, or astronomically. (Don’t do an assessment on the day of a full moon. Ever. It really does skew your results.) Also don’t be shocked if after working on certain letters, your child still doesn’t get them… or gets them and has forgotten others. That is a totally normal part of the learning process. Remember that total mastery is when in any situation at any time, recognition occurs. Until that point, it’s not fully mastered. And this goes for any skill. Which, honestly, says that I never really mastered multiplication OR division, because lemme tell ya’ll… I do NOT know that stuff in any situation. SO, don’t be too hard on your child if they forget at some point. We all do. Just keep working on it and reinforcing it in positive ways.

But the whole point of this blog post is to help you realize that you CAN give your child a “test” without them even realizing it, and it will give you valuable information that you can use to help him or her to succeed in the future. I hope that this little post has been helpful, and I’m totally willing to give more advice to anyone who has questions or needs help. Feel free to comment below.

Water Walking

Ok – so this is a totally UN-original idea that I got from Megan over at Coffee Cups and Crayons (view her post here!) And, I remember doing a similar activity when I taught third grade and we were talking about plants, capillary action, and all that jazz. For Becca, it was a simple color mixing activity that she LOVED! I will say, however, that it TAKES TIME. Our bowls didn’t look like the finished bowl set for over three hours. Perhaps that’s just because Bounty truly is the Quicker Picker Upper… and holds way more liquid before it’ll start giving any up. Who knows. But, we started the project at 4:20, and the final picture was taken just after 8pm. (It had been finished for a while, but at that point it was bed time for both kids, so snapping a pic of our science experiment was about, oh, say the last priority in my mind! HA! Ya’ll understand, I’m sure. But here are the photos of our water walking experiment, and I feel sure Becca will be wanting to do more in the coming days with other colors. 🙂 If you haven’t done this with your kids, it takes about two minutes to set up and it’s amazing! She kept saying “It was empty but now has water in it! Is green!”

Activity Boxes

I have come to realize that despite the fact that Becca dearly loves her brother and does a fabulous job of being a big sister and sharing Mommy’s time, she does NOT like it when I feed him. So suddenly my sweet, helpful, loving child becomes this raving lunatic who needs Mommy NOW… And will do ANYTHING – including creating a hugely stinky diaper and then saying she wants to sit on the potty- to get Mommy to PUT. DOWN. THE. BOTTLE. (and the baby.) So it was time to find a solution.

I’ve heard about “busy bags,” I’ve fallen in love with the idea of felt “quiet books,” and I’ve had the desire to be this amazing teacher/mom who does everything according to Pinterest. But, let’s face it… That’s just not how life works when you work from home and have two kids. You never know when, for example, a hurricane is going to hit Hawaii and you’re going to spend HOURS on hold trying to help out your poor sweet couple who is stranded on Maui for their honeymoon and have to cancel a huge portion of their trip due to weather. I’ve come to realize that most of the stuff on Pinterest is for moms that have one child, a live-in maid, and don’t do anything but make awesome stuff for their child all day long. (And let me insert here that I’m now on day FOUR of working on this post… nothing happens quickly around here, folks!)

But, back to the problem at hand. SOMETHING has got to tame the savage beast twice a day for about 30 minutes so her brother can eat in relative peace… Without relying on the tv every time. Enter the activity boxes. It truly took me ten minutes to put these together. (Because remember- I don’t have time during naptime to create fun stuff… I’m on the phone or the computer working.) Here’s what’s in them…

I have a M/W am box, a T/Th am box, and then pm boxes as well. I got the boxes at Dollar Tree. Total of $4. Yay! I decided that knowing my girl (and let’s face it… My patience level) like I do, the AM box could be more fine-motor related and detailed. (These are boxes she will have at the table, strapped into her booster seat, while I sit next to her, so I CAN offer assistance/supervision.) The PM box is way simpler bc Mommy is tired and doesn’t want to offer much assistance/supervision.

Each of the four boxes has a shape sorting activity, so here’s how the shape sorting works. I have the Shapes and Colors set from Carol’s Cutting Edge (order yours here – affiliate link) and I divided them up into four sets so that in each box there are shapes/colors that she can match up. She’s so used to sorting by color, that I wanted her to sort by shape, too. So for example, M/W pm has all the stars, ovals, crescents, rectangles and hearts that are green, yellow, brown, and white. Then T/Th pm has all the stars, ovals, crescents, rectangles and hearts that are the other colors in the set. M/W am has diamonds, squares, circles, and triangles that are red, green, blue, and yellow, and T/Th am has diamonds, squares, circles and triangles that are the other colors in the set.

Since the PM boxes are less complicated, I’ll start by describing them.

M/Wpm has shape sorting, two books, and then she can also do playdoh with cookie cutters and/or playdoh mats I’ve printed out and laminated.

T/Thpm has shape sorting with different shapes/colors, two different books, and she can color- either with crayons or with her Color Wonder markers/paper.

M/Wam has shape building sticks that I made simply by adding velcro to popsicle sticks (thank you, Pinterest). It also has shape sorting, three small books, and two different sizes of binder rings with paper clips to thread onto the rings. Then the super cool thing I did that took all of two seconds, was cut a mini paper plate in half, wrote her first name, and then put the letters on clothespins. So she can practice spelling her name as well as her pincer grip! 🙂 (I saw the idea somewhere- I’m sure probably on Pinterest.)

T/Tham has more shape building sticks, shape sorting (again with different shapes/colors from the other boxes- you can get the full set already cut out and laminated for super cheap here), three different small books, and then a cool “feed me” game I made up- with a container that came in a set of two from Dollar Tree. I just stuck pompoms in, she can dump them out, and use the giant tweezers (buy them here- and split the pack w friends – affiliate link) to feed the monster. At some point when I have time, I hope to add google eyes and draw a mouth onto the container so it truly looks like a monster. Then it’ll be a Pinterest-worthy craft, right? Ha! Then this one has a paper plate/clothespin activity with her middle name. If I find that it’s too short and not keeping her occupied, I’ll do one with our last name instead. I just thought it might be overwhelming at first… All those Ns!

UPDATE – Ok, so when I typed this up the first time, I’m not really sure where my brain was… probably distracted by something. But what’s new, right? HA! So, the M/W am description is ACTUALLY what’s in the T/Th am box… and visa versa. Oh well. You get the idea. But that’s why the pictures don’t match and are posted here instead of with each description. 🙂

So it truly took me ten minutes to put all this crap together, and you can tell- they aren’t super original ideas, but they are easy routines that hopefully will provide enough different options to entertain her for 30 mins… We shall see over time how they fair.

Why not Friday? You might wonder… Well, hubby is home every other Friday, the other Fridays are super busy and our routine is never the same as the rest of the week. So no Friday. She can just watch tv. And drive me nuts. But that’s ok. Because it’s Friday… And the weekend is coming!!! Who knows… I might do weekend boxes at some point, or if she really loves these boxes, I can always pull one out on a different day or a at a different time!

UPDATE after using the M/W am box!

I was amazed at how challenging the clothespins were for her… but then, they are another one of those things like the water pouring that I have to teach her because it’s not just built in to know how to do that! She really liked that it has her middle name, though, and it was the perfect length for beginning clothespin work! Her favorite of the activities was pouring out the pom poms and putting them back in. She wasn’t willing to try the tweezers – she said they are too big. Sigh. But, the experience I have with them is with Kindergarteners, so I’m willing to wait it out and give her time. She liked the shape sorting, but she only wanted to sort them by color – she didn’t seem to understand sorting them by shape. Thus, this is a good activity! Gotta stretch that little brain that’s so easily stuck in a rut! She also loved making shapes, letters, and lines with the popsicle sticks! I think these are gonna be a hit. 🙂

Water Pouring

I recently saw a post from Jamie over at Hands On Learning about water pouring. I repeatedly have moments as the mom of a two year old that remind me of the “deer-in-the-headlights” moment I had on my first day of teaching kindergarten when my kids all stared at the flag during the flag salute. I remember wondering why they weren’t saying the pledge, and then it hit me like a ton of bricks – BECAUSE I HAVE TO TEACH IT TO THEM! Yeah. I have that feeling a lot as a mom. I keep forgetting that this little one is a blank slate. She knows what she knows because we (Cody and I, her grandparents, the Little Einsteins, the Super Readers, Curious George, Peg and her cat, the dinosaurs from Dinosaur Train, Doc McStuffins, the Octonauts, Handy Manny, Daniel Tiger, the monsters from Sesame Street, and Jake and his band of pirates) have taught her.

SO, I read this post about water pouring and decided it was time to give it a try. Yup. We have a long way to go. But she did learn, and I noticed her starting to get more confident, and spill less even after just one day of trying. She learned that if she holds the pitcher handle with her strong hand (her left) and uses her weaker hand (her right) to support it, she can pour out the entire pitcher into the cup! She also learned that picking up a cup and pouring it toward her doesn’t work so well. But, like Jamie mentioned in her post, it was hot outside, so getting a little wet didn’t matter. In fact, it was planned. I’m hoping to have a few minutes at some point in every day to go outside and do this super simple activity. It helps to run the hose (with a sprayer nozzle) over close so you can squirt more water in the pitcher when you need it. She had so much fun, and I feel like somehow I’m a better parent for doing this with her. And it’s super cheap! (Not that our water bill isn’t outrageous every summer, but ya know, it’s not THAT much water, and what she is learning from this activity will truly last a lifetime!)

Ouchie

It’s somewhat common for me to walk into Boo’s room after her play and nap time to find some poor book with a page ripped – either partially, or completely- out. She always says “Uhoh I torn the page Mommy.” I proceed to ask “why? Why did you do that?” And she always answers the same way – with a silent stare. Because she honestly doesn’t know why she does it. I believe that. She is either too rough, or just too curious about how that flap is attached… and once she’s started taking it off, she rarely leaves the job un-finished. Which leaves me with random books laying random places around my office, waiting for me to find some book tape and fix them up. Until now. I saw a picture on Pinterest that reminded me of something I used to do in my classroom – make a Book Hospital! So, in organizing my office, I made the switch to use one of my pegboard baskets for just that purpose. I know there are more books somewhere in my office that still are waiting to be fixed, so when I come across them in my cleaning, they can be added to the hospital. When I have time, I’ll sit down with my book tape and salvage what I can of some of her favorite books. At least now they are in one central location and I can see what needs to be done without having to see them on my desk! Mission: Accomplished. Books, you may still get ouchies, but at least now maybe I won’t forget to fix you. The doctor is in.