Megan

Interpreting Test Results for Your Homeschool Child

December 18, 2018 by Megan

Standardized achievement testing is an important part of my homeschool. We test our children every year to see how they’re growing academically. And as I mentioned in my post “How My Family Benefited from Standardized Testing,” we’ve found that standardized testing provides a lot of other benefits too.

Nevertheless, if you’ve never tested your child before, the test result PDF you receive on your BJU Press Homeschool account may be a little intimidating. You might find yourself wondering “What does it all mean?” and “What should I do with all this information?” Let me walk you through interpreting test results so that you can understand where your child is academically and how you can best help him or her in the future.

Interpreting Test Results

Understanding Norms

It’s important to understand that your child’s test results don’t compare him or her to other current homeschool students in a particular grade. Your child’s score is a comparison to a norm group. A norm group comes from a group of students in a particular grade across the nation—from both public and private schools. These students all took the same test at a similar point in their academic year.

However, keep in mind that the Stanford Achievement Test was recently re-normed so that your child is being compared only to students who attended private schools. This means that the average score on the current Stanford Achievement Test is going to be quite high.

National Percentage Rank (NPR)

If you are using The Iowa Test® (the test that my family uses), you will probably notice right away the national percentile rank (NPR) score for each subtest on the first page. The NPR score indicates the percentage of students who scored lower than your child. For example, if your child had a NPR rank of 89 in Social Studies, that would mean that your child did better than 89 percent of students who took that same Social Studies subtest. Since NPR rankings above 75 are considered above average, an 89 would be a very good score. Scores ranging from 25 to 74 are considered in the average range, and scores 24 and lower are considered below average.

So—hypothetically speaking—if your child scored an NPR of 92 on the Math Total, you could be very confident of his or her readiness to tackle some more advanced math concepts. But if he or she scored a 32, you would probably want to note the weak areas and possibly slow down on (or even re-teach) some of those more difficult concepts before moving on.

National Stanines (NS)

The single-digit numbers that you see on your test results are national stanines. Stanines are another way to communicate where your child is in relationship to the average. An NS score of 5 is average. Scores between 6 and 9 are considered above average, and scores 1 through 4 are considered below average.

Grade Equivalent (GE)

The grade equivalent score is perhaps the most confusing and the most often misinterpreted score in your achievement test results. What does it mean if your third grader has a GE of 8.7 in reading? It doesn’t mean that your student is ready for eighth grade work. And it also doesn’t mean that your third grader is reading at an eighth grade level. It only means that your child did as well on this particular test as an eighth grader would. High GE scores can be confidence boosters—they indicate that your child has mastered the material on the test. They don’t indicate what grade your child should be in.

Drilling Down to Spot Weak Areas

When you look at your achievement test results, you will want to look deeper than just composite scores. Be sure to check the breakdown of scores for each subtest to see if there are any problem areas. For example, let’s pretend that your child has a composite math score of 88 (a great score), but when you dig deeper into the report, you notice that the geometry score was actually only a 29. This is valuable information—now you know that your child probably needs some extra practice with those geometry concepts.

If you don’t understand what some of those breakdown categories are, or if you need some ideas for how to strengthen some of those areas your child is weak in, please call BJU Press Testing & Evaluation. They have some awesome, very knowledgeable staff members who would love to talk with you. You can also explore the various achievement tests they offer through Testing & Evaluation.

Teaching Young Children About Elections

November 6, 2018 by Megan

We’ve always taken our children with us when we go to vote. But when my daughter was three, I noticed that she was especially excited about going. I thought her excitement was a little odd, considering that voting meant standing in line and waiting—two of her least-favorite activities. But a little election-day excitement is certainly not a bad thing, and it made the people working at the polling place smile. What really confused me, though, was that when we got ready to leave after casting our vote, she burst into tears.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her.

“We didn’t get to see the boat!” she wailed. “Where was the boat?”

Then it clicked. When we talked about going to vote, she thought we were saying boat because she had no idea what a vote was. No wonder she was disappointed!

Elections and the importance of voting can be confusing concepts for young children to understand. Here are a few tips to help you teach your young children about good citizenship.

Show Your Children That Voting Is Important

Your children may be too young to cast a ballot, but as a homeschooler, you have a great opportunity to model good citizenship every election day. Demonstrate to your children that voting is an important part of citizenship by going out to vote yourself. Take your children along with you so that they can be a part of the experience too.

Role-Play Elections

To help young children understand what voting is and why it’s important, you might want to stage an election at home. Choose a topic that is important to young children (such as “What should we have for lunch on Friday?” or “What game should we play during family time?”), and have family members vote on it. Create a ballot box from an old shoebox, and make ballots with only two choices (you may want to include pictures for nonreaders). And be prepared to act based on the winning choice! This is a great time to explain some election terms they may have heard during a campaign.

Talk About the Importance of Choosing Good Leaders

During the weeks leading up to an election, my mailbox is usually stuffed with political mailers. When I open my front door, a political flier often falls out. There are political advertisements on television, radio, and the internet—I can’t get away from them, and neither can my kids. They might be too young to understand what the president does or what the difference is between a Democrat and a Republican, but after seeing a political ad, they do sometimes ask me, “Is he (or she) good?”

When my children ask me about specific candidates, it gives me a good opportunity to talk with them about the kind of character we want to see in our leaders. I explain that a leader is ideally someone who is righteous, just, and humble. But every political candidate, just like all the rest of us, is flawed by sin. Despite that, we have the responsibility to vote for a person we think will govern wisely in accordance with Scripture.

Pray About the Election

Finally, be sure to include the election and the candidates when you pray together as a family (1 Timothy 2:1–2). Doing so will help show your children that God ultimately decides who our leaders will be. In His hands, we can trust His good plan for our nation.

3 Go-To Activities for Homeschooling Phonics

October 23, 2018 by Megan

Last week my four-year-old and my nine-year-old were arguing over the ownership of a toy. Unlike many toys in our house, this one was clearly labeled with the owner’s name. But my four-year-old can’t read yet. She is, however, learning to recognize letters, so I decided that this was a good time to introduce her to letter-sound associations. Our conversation went like this:

Mom: (pointing to the first letter of the owner’s name) What letter is this?

Four-year-old: E.

Mom: Do you remember some words that start with E?

Four-year-old: Eggs, elephant, elbow.

Mom: That’s right! E makes the /ĕ/ sound like in elephant. Does your name start with the /ĕ/ sound?

Four-year-old: (shakes her head)

Mom: Do you know someone in our family whose name starts with the /ĕ/ sound?

At this point, my daughter knew who the toy belonged to. And she had used phonics to figure it out. Our impromptu lesson was a success!

Phonics is a term that refers to the association between the printed letter and the sound that letter represents. Most reading curricula include phonics instruction—without phonics, we would have difficulty reading unfamiliar words. But phonics instruction can get really complicated; the English language has only 26 letters, but they represent 44 distinct sounds. That’s why most phonics programs (including the one from BJU Press) begin by teaching children the names of the letters and then the sounds that the letters make at the beginning of words. Later they will listen for sounds at the end and sounds in the middle of the word.

How can you as a homeschool mom help your pre-reader learn those beginning sounds and get a good foundation for future phonics learning? Here are a few ideas.

Read to Your Child

The importance of reading to your child cannot be overemphasized. Every time you read to your child, you’re helping him or her develop several key pre-reading skills, including phonemic awareness, print awareness, vocabulary development, and more. Reading alphabet books such as the following may specifically help with letter-sound associations.

I Spy Letters (by Jean Marzollo)
Seuss’s Alphabet Book
The Alphabet Book (P. D. Eastman)

Play Letter Games

Games can make learning fun. Here are a few phonics games that all my children (even the older ones) enjoy.

Alphabet Bingo: Years ago, when one of my daughters was having difficulty with phonics, I picked up an inexpensive alphabet bingo game similar to the one on The Measured Mom. My kids still enjoy playing it!
Give your child several alphabet flash cards (a few at a time) and name an object that starts with one of the letters. See if your child can identify what letter the word for that object starts with.
Play a letter-sound matching game with this free printable from Totschooling and letter magnets or puzzle pieces.

Consider a Pre-Kindergarten Curriculum for Homeschooling Phonics

If your child is four (or close to it), you may also want to check out the K4 Foundations Distance Learning homeschool program from BJU Press to teach your child pre-reading and math skills as a preparation for kindergarten. We’re using it for the first time with our four-year-old daughter, and she loves it. She enjoys doing “school” like the older girls, and she’s learning a lot of foundational skills that will prepare her well for a future of learning.

How to Engage Your Kinesthetic Learner with Art

October 9, 2018 by Megan

One of my daughters is a classic kinesthetic learner. She hops while practicing spelling words and taps her foot while doing math problems. She pretty much never stops moving.

Homeschooling a kinesthetic learner has been a bit of a challenge. For concepts to stick, she has to be physically involved in the learning process. BJU Press has been great for her because it incorporates a lot of hands-on, authentic learning. We use manipulatives to learn math concepts, and we do hands-on activities in science and heritage studies. But English and reading are a little more challenging. I’ve found that a great way to help my kinesthetic learner through these subjects is by incorporating one of her favorite activities—art.

Incorporating Art into Reading for Your Kinesthetic Learner

There are a lot of ways to integrate art into reading. Your child can draw story maps, make organizational charts, and illustrate scenes or vocabulary words. A few weeks ago, my daughter and I read a fictional selection in Reading 2 entitled “Owl Face,” which was about a girl who took care of a barn owl. After reading the story, my daughter created her own mixed-media illustration of the main character and the owl, clearly demonstrating her understanding of the text. During the “Look Again” lesson that covered the same selection, we watched a YouTube tutorial about how to draw owls, and we drew owls and wrote stories about them. That activity helped solidify a lot of what we had learned about owls, characters, and the sequencing of a story.

Incorporating Art into English for Your Kinesthetic Learner

There are also ways to blend English and art, especially during the writing process. I found out pretty early on that my daughter did a lot better organizing her thoughts when she drew pictures. So when she planned her personal narrative in English, I had her illustrate the different story details she wanted to write about, and then we put the pictures in order so she could refer to them as she wrote her first draft. That activity helped her organize her ideas and produce a coherent narrative.

I’m still learning about how to best teach my kinesthetic learner, but incorporating art has proven to be both motivational and effective. If you have other ideas for me, please share them in the comments below.

4 Tips for Developing Phonemic Awareness

September 25, 2018 by Megan

Have you ever found yourself correcting your toddler or preschooler’s diction? “No, Abby. It’s not eye cream; it’s ice cream. Ice sounds like nice.” Then you start hissing like a snake to emphasize the /s/ sound in ice. It’s in those moments (ignoring the snickers of the adults around you) that you’re beginning to develop your child’s phonemic awareness.

Phonemic awareness happens when a child becomes mindful of the distinctive sounds that make up our language and can manipulate them. It’s an important skill for communication, but it’s also important as a pre-reading skill. In fact, many reading experts cite phonemic awareness as one of the best predictors of how successful a child will be in learning to read.

So how can you, as a homeschool mom, help your young child develop phonemic awareness? Here are a few ideas.

1. Read books (or poems) with a strong rhyme.

Teachers that specialize in early childhood education have good reason to love Dr. Seuss books. Just think of how many rhyming words are in the opening few pages of his book One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish (which many a mom has memorized). Since many of his rhyming words are not really words at all, they’re great for helping children focus on how the words sound. Other books you might want to check out include these:

Sheep in a Jeep by Nancy E. Shaw
I Spy A to Z: A Book of Picture Riddles or I Spy: A Book of Picture Riddles by Jean Marzollo
Huck Runs Amuck by Sean Taylor
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? by Bill Martin Jr.

2. Play sound games.

Here are a few games that you can play with pre-readers to help them develop phonemic awareness.

Choose a sound (such as /at/) and challenge your child to think of words that end with that sound.
Choose a sound (such as /sh/) and challenge your child to think of words that begin with that sound.
Make up silly sentences that have all the words starting with the same sound (like “Freddie Frog flipped flapjacks for Friday’s fellowship” or “Sandy Seahorse sorted six seashells.”)

3. Practice breaking words into syllables.

Sounding out words by syllables is also a good way to help children distinguish individual sounds. Encourage your kids to clap, jump, or stomp when saying each syllable so that they can get a sense of the word’s rhythm.

4. Consider a pre-kindergarten curriculum focusing on phonemic awareness.

If your child is four (or close to it), you may also want to consider using the K4 Foundations Distance Learning homeschool program from BJU Press to prepare your child for kindergarten. We’re using it for the first time with our four-year-old daughter, and she loves it. As a mom, I’ve been impressed with how well it holds her attention. And I love how she’s learning a lot of pre-reading skills, including phonemic awareness. You can also check out the Footsteps for Fours curriculum (not available on Distance Learning)—my older two daughters used this program, and it’s also wonderful for developing phonemic awareness and other pre-reading skills.