7th grade assessment week (2012)

I can't believe this year is already over and this is only the second post of the year. I've missed so many moments where I could have written stories about our days. I will tell you this year was extremely trying on both of us. This was the year of puberty meets frustrated momma!

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 5^th and 6^th 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 7^thgrade is complete and our boy passed with flying colors.

Mama's third law

Language arts lesson. Look up Big words. Apply mama's third law.

Day two of assessment week

As I sit here typing this blog I so want to add humor but I simply can’t. It was an extremely frustrating day for the math assessment.

Today we did a short review of complete sentences, simple subjects, simple predicates, combining sentences, topic sentences, and supporting sentences before the language expression assessment. JD ROCKED this test! I can’t be for sure, but I think he only maybe missed 2-3 questions out of 48. It took him 55 minutes to complete it. He was nervous again. He was rubbing his fingers through his hair leaving hair all over the assessment pages. He got up for a tissue and used that as a distraction tool. I asked him to throw it away. He was moving his legs back and forth so his pants made a rhythmic sound. He was also dropping his arms off the sides of his chair and swinging them back and forth. When he read aloud he did so in a British accent. He was so busy I’m surprised he found time to answer his questions. (LOL) I thought it was odd that he kept reading a sentence as “The farmer raises (it was raise) cows.” He kept saying raises instead of how it was written - raise. So he thought that answer was correct. Oh well. I also know I need to work on transitional words like: similarly, consequently, subsequently, furthermore, however, in contrast, and for example.

Now for the Math Computation assessment. Oh where do I start? Okay from the beginning. The assessment rules stated “you should not use calculators.” We started the simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division test at 11:58 am. Fourteen minutes later JD only answered 5 problems out of 44. (Oh this is going to take awhile.) The reason it took so long was because JD is apparently allergic to #2 pencil lead, or so it seems. I asked him to “pick up the pencil and write it out.“ I guess he thought he’d lost his right arm in a freak accident or something because it took him awhile to locate the bright pink pencil in front of him and then grip it. That’s also when all the drama began. The moaning and whining were ridiculous. I stopped the assessment after five problems and emailed Jeff so he could have a pep talk with JD. I think I’m extremely patient with JD during our school days and I really thought keeping my cool today was the best course of action for JD to complete his assessment today, but truth be told…I was furious and wanted to scream, “Pick up the stinkin pencil and write of the five little digits and subtract them, for crying out loud!” But I didn’t…

Take two…after a short dip in the pool with Sarah and the girls we came back in at 12:33 and started question #6. Thirty minutes later we finally reached question #21. I’ve said, “Write it out” so many times in the past 30 minutes I’ll be having nightmares about it tonight.

Take three…after a sandwich and another dip in the pool we started question 22 at 1:40 pm. I didn’t write down where we stopped at but another break happened at 2:10 pm.

Take four…We’re in the homestretch and I’m ready to start drinking hard alcohol! I let JD finish the remaining 15 or so questions on the calculator. (After all the rules said, “Should not, not do not.” During one of the times JD was writing out a math problem and figuring it out I went online and ordered "Arithmetricks: 50 Easy Ways to Add, Subtract, Multiply, and Divide Without a Calculator." JD will slowly work on this throughout the summer break. So an assessment that should have taken 38 minutes according to the rules took JD 1 hour and 45 minutes. As slowly as he calculated on paper he still got the right answer on all but two questions. Yippie.

Even after all of that math drama can you believe I thought I could squeeze in another short assessment? I tried to have JD complete the Study skills assessment but quickly realized the error of my ways when he just would not settle down enough to focus on finding the author on a library catalog card. I stopped the assessment and said to myself, “Well, the testing days will have to be extended from three to four.” Last year we were able to do 10 different assessments in three days.

So day two of the assessment week is finally over.  JD ended the day with, "Mama, I don't think God helped us out today." I laugh inside as I'm typing this because, Yes, Jonathan...God actually helped you to live another day my little friend."  His guardian angels were working overtime to cover my mouth from screaming at JD and having hours of crying and misery and he didn't even know it.  Thanks guys, I owe ya one.

Day one of assessments

We started day one of JD’s assessment at 10:40 am, after a breakfast of Chex cereal and Organic Fat Free milk. Sarah buys organic everything and JD accidentally poured it in his bowl and this set off his day. (Grr!) Before we started on the assessment I emailed Jeff and asked him for prayer that JD doesn't get stressed out.

The first test of the day was vocabulary. Twenty minutes into the assessment JD asked for a “Poop break.” He came back and completed the assessment in a total of 47 minutes. I even stopped the clock for this break. Last year it only took 20 minutes. It looks like he only missed three questions out of 40. He didn't know the opposite of slacken. (Resume, adjust, quicken, support). He was stuck on slacken "not even being a word." I said, “Is there a prefix or suffix you could drop to figure this out?” Next was fill in the blank. He missed “Prior to the development of more _____ machines, only certain coins could be used. (The possible choices were: automatic, authentic, methodical, and sophisticated.) He couldn't pronounce sophisticated so he didn't even look at it as a possible choice. He also did not know what bewildering meant. But that’s okay. He got all three of the Latin or Greek words correct and did great on suffixes and prefixes. He also did a super job finding a word that fit in both blank spots of two sentences. It was frustrating trying to get him to stop being ticked with me. I told him to read aloud all questions and possible answers so I could see he understood what he read. I also told him to keep sounding out words until they sounded like a word he has heard before. This made him mad and we struggled with him slamming his finger down to show me what was the correct answer. I put a stop to his attitude, but only for a short time. He laid his head down repeatedly and I asked that he sit up.

The second test was on comprehension. JD was still ticked because I had him read aloud all questions and possible answers. He tended to gravitate toward one answer before reading all of the possible choices. On a few questions he would say, “I don’t know the answer.” I had to say, “Reread the passage or story and find the answer.” He still maintained his attitude during this assessment. But he ROCKED it I don't think he missed any out of 50 questions! Though some are questionable even for me...JD spent 51 minutes on this assessment.

The third assessment of the day was spelling. JD bombed the spelling test, but I'm not worried about that. The majority of the questions were a list of four possible spellings of a word and he had to pick the correct one. Out of 30 spelling words he only got 13 right. I was amazed at how he got some really big words like: regulations, distribute, sympathetic, and influence right, but missed some smaller words. I admit, even I had to look some of them up in the dictionary. This assessment took only twenty minutes to complete.

The fourth and final assessment of the day was the language mechanics assessment. This was on punctuation and capitalization. I had to stop the assessment 15 questions in because JD was extremely fidgety and missed two in a row. He kept running his hands inside his pants to rub his thighs, he was jumpy, and he was pulling his hair out methodically. After our short break I was secretly entertained by JD beat boxing, snapping his fingers, and whistling. He didn't even realize he was doing it. (LOL) He missed 5 out of 36 questions on this assessment. He was again, not reading all of the possible answers and had his head down. I know now that I need to work on letter writing with him. This assessment took 40 minutes to complete.

Total testing time on day one was 158 minutes or 2 ½ hours. Thank goodness we are done for the day. Hopefully tomorrow JD will have a better attitude. I’m so over the age of 12! (Has puberty started? I think YES!)