I had the same difficulty determining what level my son was at for different subjects when he was 5, especially reading. I remember looking for online reading tests, having him read from dolch word lists or spelling out the words for him to see if he could identify the words because he was fidgety at that age and didn't want to sit still long enough to do a reading test and would complain that his eyes were too tired. I ended up using book lists that gave a reading level of the books he could read independently and I also typed paragraphs that he had read independently into Microsoft Word to get the Flesch-Kincaid reading level, but occasionally my son would somehow manage to read things with only a few errors that came up a 12th grade Flesch-Kincaid reading level when I know he was not able to read everything at that level.
My son saw a developmental pediatrician for the first time the month he turned seven. When she asked me what grade levels he was working at I told her I didn't really know since we didn't really follow a curriculum, so she had him tested by an educational psychologist. When my son homeschooled for first grade, I just let him continue to read his science encyclopedia for reading practice because that is what he chose to read and I bought a math dictionary that he looked at but didn't seem that interested in, but I think this must be how he scored so high on the math portion on the WIAT when he had not done very much work with math. I also bought the Singapore math workbooks for different grade levels and let him choose what he wanted to work on when I could get him to do math. He did more "mental math" than anything else because of the difficulty with writing. I had to act as his scribe for math to get him to work on anything that required writing a lot of numbers especially when he got to long division.
I know that not very many questions are asked at each grade level on the WIAT, but I found the information I got from this test helpful even though the educational psychologist said my son really needed to be tested over more than one session because he complained that he was tired while taking the test. I was also told that they ran out of time before my son missed enough questions to stop the test but the one session with the educational psychologist was all our insurance would pay for and I don't know how we managed to get that. The developmental pediatrician said the same insurance company refused to pay for this testing for another child.
The WIAT showed that my son was grade levels ahead of the grade level he should have been in even though he didn't spend much time on math. I found that he could indeed work on math at the higher level with no problem as long as I acted as his scribe most of the time, but we still didn't spend much time on math because I didn't understand why he didn't want to do math the one way I had learned in school and the only way I could show him. The way he did it sometimes seemed backwards to me but he came up with the right answers. He would ask me why he couldn't do a math problem a different way or would ask me questions that I couldn't understand and it was like we couldn't communicate when it came to math sometimes. It was like he spoke a different language and I just wanted him to do it my way and get it over with. He learned so differently from the way I learned and there were many times I felt totally incompetent as a homeschool mom because of math, but I knew it would be worse for him in our public school so I didn't give up.
Math was the one subject that I thought I needed to push him in because the WIAT showed he could do it. He just preferred science and social studies and literature and language arts and so did I, and there were so many days we just didn't get around to doing math.
If I had only known about Aleks when my son was younger, I think we could have avoided the math battles and maybe he would even like math. I discovered that my son did some math problems the way my husband does them without being shown how to do it that way and my husband really liked math as a child and was competing against older students in math competitions in middle school. One of my sisters also loved math and took a lot of higher level math courses that I didn't take, but my poor kid had to deal with me trying to teach him math when I didn't have the thorough understanding of math that I needed to help him do it the way he needed to do it.
