A child’s self-confidence on the first day of school has a big impact on their education. If your children feel capable and intelligent, they’ll do better in school. Knowing everything they’re expected to know plays a big part in building that confidence.
Even in Kindergarten, keeping your child up on their education is incredibly important. Pre-kindergarten math skills have a huge impact on later achievement. If a child’s reading is behind at the end of the first grade, there’s an 88 percent chance they’ll still be behind at the end of the fourth grade.
Quiz your children on all of these skills before they take the test. Make a note of the things they have a hard time doing, and spend as much time you can trying to fill in those gaps before they take the test. If they can go into the first day of school knowing everything they need to know, they’re going to feel a lot more confident – and they’ll do a lot better.
Every test is a little bit different. There are dozens of kindergarten screeners out there. Your child might do a Brigance Test, a KDI-2, a Kinder-IQ, a DIBELS, an AABL or any number of other tests.
All of these different screeners, though, are more or less the same. There are a few things you can expect. For one, the test probably won’t take more than 30 minutes. For another, the tester will probably only expect your child to be able to do about 66 percent of the things they ask.