Week of Testing

Given our current family situation, you might think that's what I'm talking about when I say we've had a week of testing, but I'm actually referring to TESTS!  Tuesday through Thursday of this past week, Charis, Tobin, and Arden joined other members of our homeschool co-op for the Stanford Achievement Tests.  They were actually looking forward to this experience, believe it or not!  They made some great friends from last year's series of tests, and I did, too.

Parents are asked to help two out of the three testing days.  Tuesday was my day "off," so after I got the kids settled, Kenna and Lucan and I did a couple of errands.  It was quite pleasant shopping with "only" two children!  Especially since I let Kenna push her own miniature cart at Kroger--she was SO proud!  Then we came home so I could put away groceries and clean up the kitchen (we kind of left the house in a whirlwind, LOL), and I spent some time reading and playing with the little ones before we picked up the olders.

Wednesday and Thursday I was a helper in the 4th grade testing room.  Easiest job I've ever had...I worked my way through the excellent book, Cheaper by the Dozen, which is SO much better than the movie, which is absolutely nothing like the original memoir.  I was hard pressed not to laugh out loud on many occasions!

As I knew they would, the kids had a great time with the other kids who were testing, and each day they blew off the tests as "very easy."  I'm not sure whether to be pleased or concerned, LOL!  Although I will say that Arden was quite disconcerted that there was no multiplication on the 2nd grade math tests--it was all addition and subtraction.  I'm just hoping he didn't blow through it thinking it was super easy while making silly mistakes.  (He tends to do a lot of math in his head rather than writing everything down, no matter what I advise...his mental math skills are so much better than his handwriting skills at this point!)  It will be interesting to see how they all did.

To celebrate when testing was over, my friend Julia and I took our 10 kids to City Bar-B-Que, which delighted the kids to no end.  We had eaten there for Ted's going-away luncheon and discovered that it's pretty friendly to our diet (if we just close our eyes to what is probably in the sauces...but most of the kids don't like the sauces anyway), and the prices are good as well.  It was nice not to have to come home and throw lunch on the table, since testing went until noon each day.

I did make the kids continue with their science activities throughout the week, since we are monitoring the growth of our bean and corn plants.  (They look fairly sickly compared to the ones on the DVD...guess two solid weeks of rain and no sun can do that to a plant!!  Ours are indoors, but still...)  And we tried valiantly to keep up with our history reading.  But we are still a couple of chapters behind in The Lewis & Clark Expedition, and I finally decided that we could make our read-aloud a read-to-yourself this time since both Charis and Tobin had expressed interest in reading Justin Morgan Had a Horse on their own anyway.  We still have 9 weeks of curriculum left, and I'm hoping to double up on reading when possible so we won't be doing school all summer long.  With doing the Bible Bee again this year, I want to be sure we have time to soak in God's Word, plus just have some down time.  I think we all need it!