Preparing Your Child for Standardized Tests

1. Help your child to be calm, focused, and rested on test day. This begins with a good night's rest.


2. Prepare any needed materials ahead of schedule and take time for a good breakfast before the tests.

3. Remind your children that you support their effort and that daily performance is a much better indicator of aptitude than a single test.

4. Plan a post-exam activity your child enjoys as a reward for his/her hard work.

5. Take advantage of study guides and teacher suggestions for content review, especially with history and science facts.

6. Practice problem solving examples in math homework. Many problems have multiple steps for solving. By talking through the problems, your child can gain a better understanding of how to tackle them on the test.



Extra Practice for handling multi-step math problems: point out the details needed to solve the question

1. What is the question at the end of the problem?

2. Decide what operation is needed to solve the problem

3. Are there tables, charts, graphs, etc. with this problem? Read the "picture" to determine details needed to solve the problem.

4. What facts in the word problem are needed to solve the question?

5. Set up the proper operation to solve the problem

6. Solve the problem

7. Check to see if your answer make sense and answers the question given