There was one problem with the assessment - Little Man is a really good guesser! There were several questions that I knew he did not know the answers to, but he guessed and got the answers right anyway! What a kid! :)
Despite Little Man's guessing, the assessments were a very useful tool! Most of all, I found it very encouraging for me! Because my children have never been tested, I had no idea where they fit compared to other children their age. We believe it is best to let the kids learn at their own pace and not push them when they are not ready. Even though I know this is the best way for my children to learn, I still tend to worry that they might be "behind" their peers. The assessments helped ease my fears :) I found that my children are actually "ahead" of their grade level in several areas! It also helped me to see the areas where we could work a little harder. There were two things that I found especially encouraging. I wrote a post before about how Princess learned her sight words. She did not start working on her sight words until the middle half of her grade 2 year, but by the beginning of her 3rd grade year, she knew them all. When Princess did the assessment, it said that she is ahead of her grade level for sight words! Also, all three of my children are at least a grade level ahead in reading comprehension! I found this especially interesting because we have never specifically worked on reading comprehension. A speaker at a homeschool convention once said that the best way to work on your children's reading comprehension is to read to them lots and talk to them about what you read. Ask them questions and answer their questions. That is what we have done. There have been no reading comprehension work books, yet the K5 Learning assessment placed all of our children ahead on reading comprehension! That made me really happy :)
My younger children are using Math-U-See and my oldest is using Teaching Textbooks for math, so although we explored a bit around K5's site, I mostly assigned reading lessons for my children to work on while we did K5 learning. Little Man actually spent the trial period using K5 Learning as a main learning resource. He loved it! For the girls, it was more of an extra thing, although they both enjoyed watching him do it and they enjoyed the time they spent on it too. I must say that I was very impressed with all that Little Man learned in such a short time! I was doing this Is it a Letter or is it a Word? worksheet with Little Man and when I asked him if "am" was a word or a letter, he surprised me by saying "It's a word. It's the word 'am'." That is not a word I have taught him, so I asked him, "How did you know what that word says?" He told me that he learned it on K5 Learning! That speaks louder to me than anything else could! Not only did he enjoy it, but he was really learning something from it! Thank you K5 Learning!!! :)
If you are interested in learning more about K5 Learning and whether it might be right for your children, you can go to the home page here or check out their sample pages here.
When I asked my children what their favourite part was, I must confess, it was not that they were learning, it was playing around with making their characters :) Here are pictures of some of the characters they made.
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