Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment now or later???

Wow, that's a lot to read & think about! Thanks, everyone.

We beta tested Ruf's online assessment, but I'd already known that DD had crazy early milestones, so it didn't help much. I had not considered the SB. Silly me. I'll look into it. You'd definitely recommend it above the WJ, though?

The problem that I'm really trying to solve is wrt math. In every other area, I think I've got her more or less figured out. She's interested, she's at least a bit ahead (and very, very ahead in some areas), and I'm not concerned. We unschool, and plan to continue unless/until there's an issue with that, and so far that's been great (again, in every area other than math).

Math is the thing that really gets me because she has had very early milestones for counting, counting backwards, skip counting, adding, and subtracting, but she honestly doesn't seem far ahead now of where she was at 3. I feel like I must be either under- or overestimating her math abilities, and providing her with the wrong sorts of materials, and she must be getting frustrated about it. I say that because she has regular interest that just sort of peters out without much progress. If she just seemed uninterested, I wouldn't worry about it.

While I could do (and have done) curriculum-based math assessment tests to try to figure out where she's at, I get frustrated because she gives wrong answers to very easy questions, and she gets frustrated because she hasn't been exposed to a lot of the vocabulary and also because I get frustrated. I have some hope, however slight, that a good tester who isn't her mother might have better luck with her. Maybe that means that achievement might be more valuable than IQ testing, but then again maybe both would give me the most value. I'm not sure if that would change the price.

Oh, and Grinity, I am sick for a variety of reasons, some of which will get better, and some of which will not. One of the reasons is that I'm expecting DD2 in July (which will probably end up making me more, rather than less, overwhelmed).

Congratulations! DD2 will probably make you more overwhilmed, but she will probably add a very beautiful dimension to DD1's homeschooling.
I'd give that free trial at Aleks.com a try before you give up entirely. It is frustrating when they miss the easy ones, but eventually you'll find a way in. Yes I think I'd look for a tester who will answer your very specific Math question, perhaps even a Math tutor who would do his/her own asessment.

hugs,
Grinity

FWIW, I could almost have written that when my DS was, say, 4y10m. Then something flipped and he hasn't slowed down since. The only way I can account for it looking back is that his developing expertise with decoding the code that is print was much more interesting mathematically than anything else he had access to, at that time; it was only once he had that completely sussed that he was interested in other mathematical input.

FWIW I also remember frustrating unevenness at this kind of age and later. I think part of it is that it's difficult as an adult to comprehend where the difficulties are, and part of it is just that concepts don't necessarily come in a neat order. I have a piece of paper somewhere where DS wrote 49 as 409, *long* (I mean, at least 2 months :-) after I thought he had place value sussed. You have to learn to think "oh, that's interesting" :-)

Can we help with suggestions of things to offer? What kind of interest is she showing, and what have you made available already?

(I remember that this is the age we introduced DS's sum folder, with the rule that he chose what kind of sum he wanted and how many, we wrote that many of that kind of sum, he did them, we marked them, and then the sheet went into the folder. This system was only really active for a few months, but for those few months he loved it. ETA, ah, and in fact here is the first post I ever made on this forum, including a list of mathematical things he liked then, just before turning 5, in case that's any use.)

To state the obvious, no IQ test is going to help you much in knowing what maths your DD is ready for!

I totally agree with Grinity. We've had the K-12 Peabody administered in our home for $50 and that was extremely informative. Locally testing for us is sky high, so we've never done a full round. But now that we have 4 pieces of achievement data we have a good feel for where we're at. I think my child *could* be at DYS level, but it's not worth $2000 for me to find out for sure since he doesn't show any 2E tendencies and $2000 goes a LONG way towards enrichment for him.

At the very least, I'd definitely wait until she's old enough to get the data you really want! Good luck! :-)

That would be lovely.

I know when she's thinking about math because either she asks me questions incessantly (E.g., "Mama, what's 3+3+3+3+3?" followed by "Mama, what's 3+3+3+3+3+3?" and so on) or because I hear her muttering things under her breath (E.g., "1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is...10"). Mostly what I do when I notice these things is that I try to introduce math games like seeing how many different ways we can make the number ten. She loves it for about ten minutes and then that's it and she won't want to play again.

In the past, I used to get her mathy books, which she seemed to love but lately it seems like all the math books are either too long & boring or too basic. That is counter-intuitive, because she reads at a much higher level than she does math, but books that deal with anything beyond counting or basic shapes tend to have long, boring storylines involving school. While she can read them easily enough, they're just not interesting to her. We did get one not too long ago that was good, See Inside Math, but, though she did read it cover-to-cover several times I'm not sure how much she got out of it.

We also do math "tests" at her request once in a while, which, as I said earlier, don't usually go so well, and certainly don't last long. She has workbooks that her grandmother can't help buying, but I've never seen her bother with the math portion other than to practice writing numbers. In all fairness, I don't think she has anything past first grade that has math problems, so it's all pretty basic stuff.

In case I didn't make it clear earlier, she's the sort of kid who hates to be told what to do, which is why we initially adopted unschooling as our policy. She's really got her own ideas of what she's interested in, which is great, but in other areas she really communicates her needs to me, asks me questions, asks me to get her books, asks me to look things up for her, etc. But I feel like she just doesn't even want me to know what she's up to wrt math.

Perhaps she is embarrassed that it's obvious that she's not as good at it as DH & I are. She does tend toward perfectionism, but for the most part we've managed to address that before it became an issue.

I guess y'all are right that testing now isn't going to answer this question for me.

I've had some of these same issues with my son. I finally decided that to get a good feel of where he is in his understanding of math concepts, I needed to just watch him as he did math. If he understood the concept but made a silly mistake, I didn't worry about it. We just went on in concepts. The accuracy in calculations came with time, though it does still lag his conceptual development to some degree.

Can you sit down with her and just play around with math? Talk about fractions of things. Get her to help you bake and make 3/4 of a recipe, and see what she understands of it. If she can easily figure out the amounts, then you've learned something important about her understanding of numbers and fractions. Play with powers of ten - 5+8 = 13, so 50+80 = ? (or phrase it as five tens plus 8 tens = how many tens?). Ditto with multiplication - play around with sets of numbers (three sets of three = ?) and then change it to incorporate different powers of 10 (three groups with three tens in each = how many tens?). If you name a number, can she give you the number you'd add to it to get to 10? To 100? What about negative numbers? A lot of kids understand those very intuitively, and they can be exciting to play around with for a while.

At her age, she definitely doesn't need to be doing lots of any one type of problem. Just play around with different topics for a few days, and see what you find out. Keep it low key, fun, and short. You can look up online placement tests for ideas of different concepts to include in your "play."

I don't know if that will help you, but it might help you figure out a bit more where she is without spending any money.

Oh! Congratulations!

Mmm. Sounds to me as though you need to reverse out of the "math tests" lane, if you have any control, and go in a different direction asap. How about "This isn't a test, it's a practice sheet. That means it's supposed to be on things where you might get them right and you might get them wrong. If you get them *all* right, I've made a mistake by making it too easy for you, so I hope you'll get a few wrong."? Maybe not exactly that, but it does sound as though you might need to put clear water between you and her and the idea that making mistakes is bad.

Incidentally, does See Inside Math really have the error reported in the Amazon reviews? That's appalling, if so.

Might not be for right now, but if you haven't already do get a Murderous Maths book or two for having around. Lots of good maths, no long boring storyline involving school. (DS could cope with the maths at your DD's age, but didn't really get the humour, and thus start to get the whole experience of reading the books, until a little later. YMMV.)

One thing you might want to do now is back off arithmetic and do lots of geometrical things, magnet tiles tesselations, shape building, logic puzzles etc. I think if it were me I might even avoid mentioning that these things are maths, and just present them as their own thing.

Oh, no, the thing is, she's never been in school and has no experience with or knowledge of tests other than that I find a list of questions on the internet and we snuggle up and go through them together. Sometimes we do SAT practice questions (for my own amusement) or some other random thing (again, for my amusement) and she's totally fine with guessing/not knowing. Or she does medical questions with her dad, when he's studying for the boards, and she has absolutely no problem getting things wrong in that context. We've also done the if-you-get-them-all-right-that-means-its-too-easy thing, for years now, because she used to be shy about reading. And she's definitely seen both me & her dad making plenty of mistakes on tests and not throwing huge fits or feeling badly about ourselves.

We did discuss it last night, and she said she thinks she's bad at math. Sigh. I tried to explain that the only reason I'm better than her is because I've been practicing for years & years, and that if she practices she can be even better than I am, but she doesn't buy it. She also said she doesn't like math because it makes her brain hurt.

And then this morning she woke up before me, climbed into bed, and asked me, "Is 3 even or odd?" I mean, she's known the answer for years, but it still shows that she's thinking about math.



LOL! I didn't actually read it myself, so I couldn't tell you. I'll try to remember to take a look the next time we go to the library.

Thanks for the ideas so far. She does like geometry, but I don't know much to do wrt that other than to pull out my Euclid, and I don't dare do that yet. We do lots of cooking together, but she will absolutely not answer if I ask her to do math during cooking. We've done negative numbers since DD was 2 or 3, so she knows all about those and they're no longer exciting.

I'll check out Murderous Maths.

To be clear, I'm really not worried about calculation errors or even about slow progress. That's fine, as far as I'm concerned. What worries me is the attitude that she has about it, and the fact that I don't know where it came from or how to deal with it.