Test Prep – K-12:Getting Ahead!

education, educational tools

This Little Parent Stayed Home recently reviewed Testingmom.com. Testing mom is a web site for test prep for K-12 kids. (If you haven’t listened This Little Parent Stayed Home is great!)

Personally I have at least one child that just doesn’t test well.  He can know the material inside out, but put a test in front of him and yikes! I blame it partly on being a perfectionist.  He has to go over every part a million times and if he doesn’t know the correct answer for sure, he will not take an educated guess.  He finally sat in on a training session for the ACT and ended up raising his score the 1 point he needed to go from no scholarship qualification to yes, you are at the qualification.

Another son can go in cold, forget his calculator accidentally and  score and amazing high score without even preparing ahead.  They are both great students, but they have crazy different ways of dealing with tests.

I already see my youngest getting ready to have issues with tests.  His very literal translation of everything we say is going to make homework and test taking almost impossible.  I can already see the “Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?” – Well I have to have more information!  They don’t say what was on the other side of the road.  Was their chicken food?  Was a wolf chasing him on the other side?  I also have these issues with my hubby and he somehow finished and got a PhD, so I’m sure my youngest will finish school – it just may take an advocate in the new educational environment.

The site testingmom.com is a site that offers test prep to help kids excel at testing.  Testing anymore determines where kids place, what groups they are included in, what services they qualify for, and even whether they can be included in a standard classroom.  This site is worth checking out if your child needs a little help with testing or even just wants to get ahead.

The founder started the site because her son was told that he would never function in a normal classroom! He now is has a degree from NYU.

Karen first became interested in testing when she noticed that her son, Sam, wasn’t developing as quickly as her daughter had. A doctor diagnosed a hearing problem that could be fixed via surgery and (after giving Sam an IQ test where he scored in the 37th percentile) pronounced that Sam would never function in a regular classroom. Luckily, Karen’s mother was a PhD in Early Childhood Development. She showed Karen how to work with Sam and get him ready for both testing and a regular classroom. Karen worked diligently with Sam for about 30 minutes every day doing activities that would build the abilities he needed for school and testing. A year later, Sam scored in the 94th percentile on an IQ test. He was admitted to a competitive private school in Manhattan and was placed in honors classes.

Karen went on to co-found a consulting business helping families get their kids into NYC’s best public and private schools. There, she taught parents how to work with their children to get them ready for testing just as she had worked with Sam. A few years later, she left the company and wrote The Ivy Chronicles, a humorous novel about the experience of working in the competitive school admissions world of NYC. Karen wrote a total of four novels (two of which have been optioned as movies) before going back to the book she says she was “meant to write” – Testing For Kindergarten. In 2010, Karen co-founded TestingMom.com with Michael McCurdy, a site that offers test prep and a full array of top premium educational websites as part of their membership package. Karen lives with her husband, Mark, in San Diego. Her daughter, Schuyler, is a working actor in NYC. As for her son, Sam, who was never supposed to function in a regular classroom? He just graduated from NYU.