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Hi Parents – I stumbled across this website today. I am curious, what resources/prep tools did you use to prepare your child for Kindergarten SEES testing? Thanks in advance for your help!
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We primarily used IXL, and I can’t say for certain, but I think it aligned reasonably well with the Classical test. For reading, we focused on reading strategies and vocabulary. I have no clue what actually ended up being on the Reading portion of the Classical test — my daughter did not give a straight answer about whether she was actually asked to read anything — but it sounds like it started with identifying pictures of common things (i.e. “Point to the picture of the cat”) and then maybe progressed to word identification? She was already reading fluently at the time of testing, so if they did ask her to read, I’m confident that she didn’t have a problem with it — I just have no idea if that was actually a factor in her score or not. So all that to say I don’t feel like I have a clear idea of whether a child needs to be a fluent reader to score well on the Classical Reading test.
For math, we mainly just drilled addition and subtraction problems within 20 and tried to do an even mix of straightforward problems (i.e. 9 – 3 = ?) and word problems. As we got closer to our test date, I noticed that getting her to memorize basic addition and subtraction facts wasn’t going to happen, so we pivoted to primarily mixed operation word problems. We also did a lot of practice with counting on fingers — i.e. if she got stuck on 8 + 4, we’d have her say 8 with a closed fist, then count up four on her fingers, or for something like 12 – 3, she’d say 12 with a closed fist and then count backwards on her fingers until she had three fingers up, like *12*, 11, 10, 9. I think that really hammering that strategy in the week or so before the test was helpful.
For gifted practice, we got two wipe-clean test prep books, one for the OLSAT and one for the NNAT. I just looked them up, and the publisher was Mind Inventions. My daughter really loved these, and they were super fun. They both came with stickers, which was a big selling point too. That said, I don’t think they were adequate for prepping for the gifted exam. I’m not sure what else we could have focused on that might have been more helpful — maybe working on strengthening her working memory? She was diagnosed with ADHD after testing, and working memory was one of her weaker areas, so I’ve since speculated that maybe that was a component of the gifted test. In retrospect, I also think I probably should have spent more time on problems where you need to select the item in a group that doesn’t fit, as my daughter would fairly often choose the wrong answer with these (but then provide a reasonable explanation for her choice! she just didn’t have enough background knowledge to flag the option that was officially considered correct).
To give an idea of how effective these methods of test prep may or may not be, here are my daughters scores:
Classical Reading – 99.8th percentile
Classical Math – 99th percentile
Gifted – 129 (out of 160)
I hope this helps, and good luck!
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Petra- at what age did you start training? My child is 3 years and 4 months. Should they already know letter sounds and solid on counting? I think she’s smart but IDK if I’m lagging on this.
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We started actually doing test prep the summer before she started PreK4. So we started prepping in mid-June (when she was 4 years and 5 months old) and she tested in mid-December (at 4 years and 11 months). I’d say we aimed for about 10-15 minutes a day of test prep-related stuff, but there were some days we did significantly more, and some days that we did nothing at all. I tried to make it a fun bonding activity instead of like…work, and I’d say I was probably 80% successful.
I wouldn’t say that we ever explicitly taught her numbers, letters, letter sounds, etc. — we just exposed her to it a lot, she took an interest in it, and she picked up on it pretty organically, especially with learning to read. We did start practicing sounding out words with her when she was 2-going-on-3, but it wasn’t for the purpose of test prep, more just something that she enjoyed doing and that we encouraged. We mostly did this using Picture Words flashcards. We also got her a pack of First Little Readers books (level A) a month before she turned 3, read them every night at bedtime, and she was able to read them independently by the time she had her birthday. Math (like actual computation) was something she didn’t pick up as naturally, but again, we didn’t actually consciously set out to teach her how to count, or identify shapes, that kind of thing — she just kind of picked up on it on her own. Oh also she really wanted a blue calculator for her 3rd birthday, so we got her one and let her noodle around on it, and I honestly think that helped internalize some number sense for her too.
Anyway, idk, I guess my strategy at age 3 was mostly just to constantly expose my child to numbers, counting, letters, and reading. My sense is that for the Classical test, they are expected to be able to count and to know letter sounds, but that it’s not really necessary for the gifted test. At least for me, the content of the gifted test was (and still is!) more of a mystery, and so I didn’t really have a great idea of how to prepare for it.
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I think the gifted test is more like CogAT. You can find some books on Amazon.
I did not prep my daughter for the tests and her classical scores were in the 80’s and 142 for gifted.
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