21 May, 2012 – Day one of assessment week
After a quick review of the Reading Comprehension rules we came up
with like: read carefully, find backup information, point to evidence, we
started our 2012 assessment with the Practice Reading test. The practice test
took 10 minutes.
After Jonathan got a peek at what was expected from this year’s
assessment we went onto the real Reading/Language Arts assessment. There were
55 questions total and “generous allowed time” was 70 minutes total. However,
The Reading/Language Arts assessment was broke down into parts 1
& 2. We started part 1 at 2:00pm. During our assessment and old friend
called and I talked with her for 10 minutes. Jonathan was busy again this year
playing with hat and making small noises and tapping. He was also moving around
in his seat a lot. Part one was over at 3:02pm. The book gave a suggested test time
of 35 minutes and he took 52 minutes to complete 23 questions.
Part 2 was started at 3:07pm and stopped at 3:15pm for a snack I
allowed him to have during the assessment. He was self distracted by eating an
apple and Cheetos and he missed an easy question. I restarted again at 3:21pm
and the assessment finally ended at 4:23pm. The book gave a suggested test time
of 35 minutes and he took 70 minutes to complete the remaining 32 questions.
The total assessment time today was 127 minutes.
There was a lot of reading today so overall I think he did well as
far as test time. If he was slightly more focused and well rested he maybe
could have pressed on faster and still would have been as accurate at answering
questions. He was yawning a lot and complaining of being tired.
One of the passages talked about Black Holes. He was thinking that
in the future Black Holes could be used as our landfills since according to the
passage some people have assumed that things that enter the holes end up in
another dimension.
This year as with years past I have been the person filling in the
bubbles. This allows me to ensure Jonathan marks the correct answer. So he
calls out A – Alpha or B – Bravo and I mark it. He was having fun guessing what
letters A – J were. By the way they are: Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo,
Frank, George, Hotel, I is missing from the assessment answers but its Indigo,
and finally Juliet. Jonathan says: alpha, bravo, Charlie, dingo, echo, fart,
George, heaven, institution, jay walker. It was fun to hear him call them out
but I hope he learns them correctly before entering the Army. (Smile)
Possible and plausible score for this assessment was an 89%
because he missed 6 questions out off 55 that I’m aware of.
22 May, 2012 - Day two of assessment week.
Today was math day. I HATE math day, especially when it says “Do
not use calculators.” Today felt like everything we did this year and in years
past to include last week’s review was dumped accidentally BEFORE the
assessment. The frustrated and sad feeling I felt I will equate to our computer
crashing and losing all the information we had from 2002 until present. While I
thought about backing the information up I didn’t and the computer crashed
before we backed it up.
Simply put I was ready to explode today. I couldn’t believe
Jonathan was stumped by some of the simplest questions today. By question eight
I was ready to blow so I emailed Jeff asking him to call here to talk with
“Junior.” Prior to the call I told Jonathan I was taking away the mind rotting computer
games and video games that he longed to play. Needless to say after Jeff talked
with HIS child, Jonathan walked off crying.
Before a pencil hit any paper I went over the math rules I
established for Jonathan. They were: read the questions carefully, calculate
twice, write or list the problem out, ask yourself, “What do they really want
to know?”, and finally do the inverse to check your work. Once Jonathan washed
his face and returned from the call from his dad we finished the remainder of
Math Section 1. The “generous time allowed” was 10 minutes for just 9
questions.
One of the questions that stumped him was -11(neg. 11)+7=?. He
stared at the book and looked around, but never gave me an answer. Prior to the
math assessment I handed him a clean 8.5” x 11” piece of paper and a two sharp
pencils. After I saw him go into Jonathan Land I slowly drew him back with me
grabbing a piece of paper and drawing out 11 hash marks on the left side of a
circle and 10 hash marks to the right side of the circle. I started on the left
side and counted seven to the right and got -4. I did this for myself but he
saw it when I was quickly trying to hide it. Another easy question was North
America is 25,349,000 kilometer and South America is 17,611,000kilometers. How much
bigger is North America than South America? In hindsight I can see where the
confusion began. The possible answers were: between 6-7 kilometers, between 7-8
kilometers, between 8-9 kilometers. But in order to even look at the answers he
would have to perform a math function (+,-, x, or div.) He was truly stuck not
knowing what function to perform. Then, I said between my teeth, “Write it
out.” He wrote the sizes across from one another and not stacked. I corrected
him and he quickly retreated to moving and looking around and not looking at
the stuff he just wrote out. He finally got the right answer but it took 10
minutes!
I guess I shell shocked him by saying “Write it out” so many times
that he even wrote out the most simple problems. On one problem what they
wanted to know was adding what missing math function would make this problem
true. He quickly figured it out with his first choice but still kept trying to
solve the problem using B, C, and D’s choices; even though answer A clearly
made the problem true and he calculated twice he still continued writing out
other possible answers. All in all that was not a bad strategy; however, it was
a complete waste of precious time.
I called Jeff around question 8 which was an estimation question.
There were four problems to estimate and give the biggest sum as the answer to
the problem. Jonathan actually told me he“FORGOT” how to estimate. WHAT!? I
think my head was smoking and spinning around like a cartoon character.
Both of us felt beaten, defeated, drained, and strained when he
answer question # 9 70 minutes after we started! (Oh, the agony!)
The next test of the day was Math Section 2. The generous time
allowed was 30 minutes. (Crap triple that…is what went through my head.)
Hopefully he’ll use the calculator and breeze through this like a knife in hot
butter. There were 23 questions to answer and don’t you know he hardly even
used the calculator. (UGH!) There was a lot of moving and tapping and humming.
We started at 1:35 and stopped only 35 minutes later.
The last assessment of the day was Mathematics Computation. The
generous time allowed was 20 minutes for 20 questions. We started at 2:22 and
ended 40 minutes later. Hey that’s double the time! There was a thunderstorm
outside and Tater was distracting Jonathan by whining at the door. During this
portion of the assessment I said, “Less tapping please.” Jonathan said, and I
quote, “Yes ma’am, but I just have to be moving. It feels uncomfortable if I
don’t.”
Possible and plausible scores today were: 93.7% on
the Mathematics portion because he only missed 2 out of 32 questions. Then he
scored a solid 100% on the Math Computation portion of 20 questions.
23 May, 2012 - Day three of assessment week.
Today was vocabulary, language mechanics, and spelling day. We
started out the day by joining forces and making zucchini bread for the Pastor
and staff at our church. Jeff also had the day off because he had two
appointments to attend. So I knew this day would be tough and distracting but I
also had hopes that it would not be as tough as the Math day. The first
assessment was on Vocabulary words. Jonathan has been reading a cartoon SAT
book all year long but it did not come into play in this assessment. (Oh
well…there’s always use for big fancy words.) Jeff arrived home from his first
appointment just in time to open and close the refrigerator, rustle bread
wrappers, and make lunch while Jonathan was attempting to start his assessment.
I stopped the test and we broke for lunch early. Sorry babe…Jeff had fasted that
morning, but I thought after his appointment he would eat breakfast out.
Since there was no review to conduct we jumped into
our first assessment at 12:10pm and for 30 minutes Jonathan’s brain was rip
roaring through those pages. The “generous time allowed” was 15 minutes. He was
nervously fingering through his hair after the sample question used the word
“marred” and he didn’t know what it meant. I talked him down from pulling his
hair out and calmed him down. Some of the questions asked what one word fit’s
it both sentences, find the opposite meaning, and find the same meaning. He did
have difficulty pronouncing convenient and nonchalantly, but overall I thought
he did great. His score of 85% backs that up.
We spent some time reviewing his prior answers before moving onto
Language Mechanics. This is the portion of the assessment where he checks for
punctuation, capitalization, and word usage. I had already conducted an
extensive review with him earlier on all these items. We started the assessment
at 1:15pm and ended only 25 minutes later. The “generous time allowed” was 15
minutes. Jonathan did a phenomenal job on this and blew it out of the water
with an amazing 95%. I was surprised that sending or return addresses would be
difficult for him. That’s what we get for email exchanges. At one point I asked
if they split up Ohio and made a new state called Mansfield Ohio because there
was no comma to separate them. Commas tripped him up this year.
I think Jonathan calmed down after we reviewed those answers or
maybe he knew I was not concerned with the next assessment score. The last and
shortest assessment of the day was the Spelling. He only managed to squeak out
a 35% on this test, but out of fairness he did recognize MANY of the 80 total
words as spelled correctly. Each of the 20 questions had four possible choices.
I copied the sheets and asked him how he narrowed each one down and he was able
to tell me where he had seen most of them. You won’t believe it. Some locations
were from video games, TV commercials, TV show titles and network names, road
billboards, and books. We started the assessment at 2:20pm and ended 10 minutes
later. The “generous time allowed” was also 15 minutes. There were just two
words he didn’t know how to pronounce and they were pageant and elegance.
24 May, 2012 – Day four of assessment week
We’re both breathing more easily today because there were only two
assessments left. We did a short review on science related things and started
the assessment at 10:30am and ended 40 minutes later at 11:10am. The “generous
time allowed” was 25 minutes. This year’s science seems like a repeat. He
needed to know the same things I taught him from both 5th and 6th
grade. Some but not all of the things were: what animals pollinate flowers and
how, food webs, desert environments and plant survival, rainforests, colors
that reflect sunlight, light, solar eclipse, weather, ozone layers, farming, fields
not growing, experiment process, three laws of motion, and fossils.
He scored an 88%. There was a lot of humming, tapping, and
multiple comments from me that he needed to focus. He was like a
Jack-in-the-box taking this assessment, but he was happy (and so was I.)
The Social Studies assessment was started just 20
minutes later. We discussed having lunch first but he wanted to press on. I was
surprised at how easy this assessment was. We pulled down the huge bouncy ball
we made into a globe and studies longitude, latitude, and degrees. Then, we
reviewed polar, desert, subarctic, and tropical environments along with
geographic features, plains, plateaus, mountains, valleys, and rivers. There
was a chart to interpret and some ancient writings questions. We reviewed the
constitution, branches of government and different types of old and new
governments around the world. Luckily feudalism is in one of Jonathan’s games
because he was able to tell me all about it and the fact that I mispronounced
the name. The last thing we reviewed was populations and growth. We started the
assessment at 11:30am and ended just a half hour later at 12:00pm. The
“generous time allowed” was 25 minutes. He scored a 96%.
So there you have
it. The 7thgrade is complete and our boy passed with flying colors.
Moving on...this summer was the first time ever that I tried canning. It all started when our friends The Neighbors (literally) invited me to come over and pick some plums. I'd already been there earlier in the summer to pick blueberries to eat my fill of and freeze for the winter. Now I was able to pick plums to my hearts desire? Oh, I'm in heaven....wait...what will I do with all of those plums? My friend and owner of the plum tree had canned her plums so I decided to do the very same. Long story short I visited a site called "Pick-your-own" and soaked in all the pages I could before I hibernated in my kitchen for the next couple of weeks. I made various kinds of sugar free jellies to include but not limited to: plum, strawberry, strawberry kiwi, peach, peach pineapple, triple berry, blueberry, and finally blackberry. In fact some of them were so good I made multiple batches. 
We also planted a garden again this year. And this year the deer stayed out of it. The Neighbors tilled my ground and we "borrowed" some of Molly and Rose's (their horses) "fertilizer." My garden boomed with produce. I was getting squash and zucchini like crazy at first. Then, tomatoes and spices, and beans and oh time for camp. I did manage to pickle some of the cucumbers into pickles, but I notices I picked the wrong ones. The pickles aren't half bad. I also managed to can some tomatoes too. And finally I have hang drying in my garage right now...spices from the right side of the screen. 
