So, I’m thinking that if most of you are like me the “no testing” rule is really hard to abide by. I am always looking for sneaky ways to see what my 2 year old knows.
Today I cut out little shapes (2 of each shape) from coloured cardboard and put them into plastic easter eggs. Oh so exciting for him to open them! “A SWARE! I FOUND A SWARE!” As he opened them he’d line them up in a row and when he found a partner shape he’d put it beside the other one. “They’re fwends.” Tomorrow I’ll try colours…but I think I’ll print the colour word on a small paper and make his “fwend” a piece of coloured construction paper. Then he can match the word with the colour. I’ll do this with instruments, family pictures/names, animals, etc… As long as I can ride this train I will!
I also bring his stuffed dog, Bones, to the reading corner and have Bones “ask” my son what different words are. (Bones also helps us at teeth brushing time!)
Your son is brilliant! He is able to identify and pair up similar ones…Smart Kiddo! Keep up the good work…
As for testing, I do ask him questions related to what he has learnt during other situations like playing or just talking with him…I ask him to pick up the red ball, blue shorts etc…
To be fair, I suggested pairing to him…but he continued with only one example. When he wakes up from his nap I’ll try Canadian coins in the eggs. He LOVES the caribou (quarter)!
Oh he is so bright! I told you kizudo, he’s really holding stuff in, and your going to have to “trick” it out of him. My son was the same at that age. He’d play with his letter bus and say the letters before he’d push it, and when he discovered someone was watching him, he’s get ticked off! LOL
I test my girl every day, every time, lol I put the words on the wall, so I say the words only one time, than, I made she read for me, like we are playing, she think it is fun and I know what she knows. :ph34r:
I test my son but I have to be very careful to do so in a “sneaky” way as well. He is very anti testing. Often if you ask him one thing in front of dad or grandma he tell you out right “I don’t want to do this”. Yet if you pull out games or play verbal games to “test” his skills, he’ll play along. I also keep stick on chalkboards and magnetic boards for him to “show” me what he knows. I write sentences on the boards and he happens to go by these boards everyday and something new always catches his attention and he will read it to me or ask me about it etc. Also, the Learning Journey has a lot of word and picture pair up puzzles that we played with often, not only was it good for vocab building but it was also fun to see what he knew while playing at putting word and pics together. I think that most parents do some sort of testing. Some do it more through play and others do it more through actual testing, and some are so subtle that they may not even realize they’re doing it until it’s done. Either way, I think that parents know what their children react best to and as I’m sure we’re all aware, children will not do what they don’t want and there really isn’t any way to get them to answer if they don’t feel like it.
I have to be sneaky when testing my son as well, he does not like to be tested AT ALL. infact sometimes he will read a word if I haven’t asked him, but as soon as I get involved he clams up. So I just introduce words in different ways, Like I took our upwards game and I wrote out some words on a piece of paper and had him find the letters in the upwards game that matched to spell the words, and he just places each letter on top of the letter I wrote. I’ll also take a baby doll and put labels on its body parts and then have him place the “bandaid” on top that has the same words written on them so he’ll match the word, and it helps me to see that he is looking at the letters and how they’re formed.
Other than that I’m hoping someday he’ll come around, in the mean time we just keep plugging away at it.
For body parts, I ask were is Lily’s ________, Mommy’s ________, Violet’s (her baby sister) ________, and she points and repeats the part. We do this with bones and some organs too.
We have a large bucket of plastic animals. I take out the animal and ask her what it is and she tells me or I will ask her to find a certain one and she does.
We do this type of activity with many of our subjects and Lily, at 16 months, loves it!
