Tips to get Your NNAT Child to Study

It can be very hard to get your NNAT child to sit still and do NNAT test prep! By the time you do NNAT test prep with your child, they have already gone through a whole day of school, often have completed their after school extra curricular activities and done their homework. It makes sense that after a long day of schooling, your child is tired during NNAT test prep. I have compiled tips below to help guide you towards more productive NNAT test prep with your child.

• Avoid distractions: This can be one of the hardest tips to implement, especially with you have more than 1 child in the home. In order to keep your child interested and invested in NNAT test prep, you need to make sure they are focused. That could mean a household wide ban on TV during NNAT test prep sessions. I would also suggest setting a section of the house for homework and NNAT test prep. Even just a setting that is only for homework and NNAT test prep can help your child concentrate.
• Organize your test prep: Make sure that when your child is ready to sit down for NNAT test prep, that you as a parent are ready. Have all of the NNAT materials there for your child to work with. When you need to leave your child alone to gather other NNAT materials, or spend time organizing which NNAT activities your child needs to complete, you give them time to get distracted and they can lose their focus.
• Keep on track: You should create a system for NNAT test prep before you start. That will ensure that every session of NNAT test prep will be efficient and you will not go over materials that you previously taught your child.

It can be difficult to focus your child on the task of NNAT test prep. Go to this site to find more information on how to best prepare your child. Good luck on the NNAT!

 

When to Start Preparing for the NNAT

A lot of parents do not know when they should start preparing their children for the NNAT. Unfortunately, some schools do not inform parents that their child is going to be taking the NNAT until the week before! But if that does happen, then you will at least know for next year. You will be able to start preparing early for the NNAT on to ensure that your child scores the highest score ton the NNAT hey can. Here are some tips on when to start preparing and how to prepare your child on this timeline:

• Start at least 3 months in advance: This can be difficult to follow if, as I mention above, your school did not inform you that the NNAT test is taking place. However, if you have that information, then you should start preparing for the NNAT 3 months in advance. You may think that that is a long amount of time to be preparing your child, but know that these concepts should be learned as organically as possible. You should not do NNAT practice questions every day and you should limit NNAT test prep to about 10 to 20 minutes a day.
• Vary the Test Prep: You should not have your child taking practice NNAT tests and doing practice questions the entire time they are preparing for their NNAT test. You need to vary the NNAT test prep to ensure that they are learning the skills organically and to ensure that they are not beset by NNAT test prep fatigue. You can teach them NNAT skills through physical puzzles or through apps that have appropriate skills that they test.
• Keep test prep short: While you should begin NNAT test prep 3 months in advance that is so that you can keep daily NNAT test prep at 20 minutes. Every other week, administer a practice NNAT test to see where your child skills lie.

You can find more materials to help prepare your child for the NNAT on this site. Good luck on the NNAT.

NNAT Test Prep: Before and After

How do you decide if you want to prepare your child for their upcoming NNAT test? You should think about how your child is going to react on the NNAT test day, if you had prepared them versus if you had not prepared them. You want to ensure you make the best decisions for your child, and deciding to do NNAT test prep can be a tricky decision to make. But to make that decision you need to think about how your child will react on the NNAT test day before doing the NNAT test prep and after doing NNAT test prep.

Before you do NNAT test prep and your child takes the standardized NNAT test for their Gifted and Talented program, their most overwhelming feeling is confusion. Most of the tests your child will take they have not seen before. Especially for the cognitive and intelligence tests, the question types are very specific and can be especially confusing for a child who has not seen that kind of question before in their life. They can get tripped up by the structure of a question and not allow their natural intelligence to shine through and answer the question correctly. They could become too stressed by the NNAT test to complete all of the questions!

After you complete a NNAT test prep routine with your child, their feeling going into the standardized NNAT test will be confidence! You will have gone over the different question types, figure analysis (hole punch) questions, figure classification questions, and spatial visualization questions with your child at home. When your child sees that question type, they will be confident in being able to answer the question correctly! For very young children being NNAT tested outside the classroom, they will be comfortable with the NNAT testing location because you will have taken them to the location previously as a part of the NNAT test prep. They will not have to focus on how to answer the questions they see, but what the correct answer to the question is.

NNAT Test Prep to help your child is a large commitment to make, and it can be tricky to decide to start NNAT test prep. But think about your child and how they will feel on the NNAT test day. You want them to feel confident and let them shine! Help their NNAT test day be a success by preparing before hand. Find more resources on this site!

Tips for NNAT Parents 2

I posted earlier this week with a couple of tips for NNAT parents and it resonated with a lot of parents. So I decided to bring the topic back in this blog post and cover some more exciting tips for NNAT parents!

• Spend time with your child: This means that you need to spend quality, fun time with your child, and not just interact when you are driving them from school to practice or doing NNAT test prep with them. You should set aside a couple of hours every week to go to the park or to the museum or just to take a walk and talk with your child.
• Work on Yourself: It can be very tempting as a parent to neglect your own life and comfort for your child’s NNAT test prep or their piano recital or to host the sleep over they want. But you need to make sure you also keep you up to par! Try and get out by yourself once a week to grab coffee with a friend without your kids. That way you are more refreshed and energized for the next round of NNAT study!
• Work your way up to big events: Your child cannot initially complete a whole hour of NNAT test prep, so you worked your way up to that hour little by little. Every week you would add an extra 5 minutes of NNAT test prep and that is how you got your energetic child to sit still for a whole hour of NNAT test prep! The same process can be applied to your own life. Do not try to skip to the end step of a project you have. Break it down into baby steps to keep you from getting frustrated.

There are good resources on this site for keeping your life as stress free as possible as a parent. Good luck on the NNAT!

Tips for NNAT Parents

There are a lot of tips out there for parents, but not all of them are geared towards parents going through NNAT test prep with their child. It can be hard to find the right balance in parenting when you are preparing your child for their upcoming NNAT test. You want to make sure that you are keeping the NNAT practice fun, as well as making sure they get all of the knowledge and skills they need for the NNAT. Combine NNAT test prep with soccer practice and Girl Scout meetings and piano lessons and you and your child have a very busy life! Here are some tips to keep your life balanced as a parent while you prepare your child for the NNAT.

• Communication: This can seem like a bit of an obvious tip, considering you try and speak to your child at all times to keep them involved and entertained and especially during NNAT prep. However, you need to make sure that conversation is not always superficial. You want to make sure your child knows they can tell you anything, from a bully at the school to being overwhelmed by the amount of NNAT test prep you are doing. This is a good way to ensure that your child does not act out because of issues they have.
• Know your child’s friends: You want to make sure that you are involved with every part of your child’s life, from helping them with NNAT prep to driving them to school. But you want to make sure that your child is hanging out with a good set of kids. Environment is stronger than will and you want your child’s friends to be excited about school and learning, not future delinquents.

Get some help with fun and interactive NNAT practice resources on this site. Good luck on the NNAT!

 

If you don’t do NNAT test prep, no one will

In the current state of education in this country, there is only so much a school can do for your child. You need to be personally involved in your child’s education and NNAT test prep and learning to ensure that they are getting the best education they possibly can. I know that when your child was younger, you would read to them. You would talk with them and explain the world around them. You would answer all of their questions, and discuss whatever topic your child wanted to talk about. When they were very young, you taught them fine motor skills and what a square is, helping get ready for the NNAT. By the time they were ready to go to school, you may have even been teaching them to read.

But that kind of dedication to your child and their intellect cannot stop when they go into school or take the NNAT for the Gifted program. Children only learn so much while they are in the classroom, and teachers are not always focused on your little one. You can focus entirely on them for NNAT test prep in the home.  Children can fall through the cracks in the classroom, such as not telling a teacher they do not understand long division, and then being behind in math for the rest of the year! Parents should check in with their children, review their homework to see where their child is succeeding and where their child needs help. NNAT test prep can also help you identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses.

Children also benefit from that parental educational involvement. They learn from their parents that their education is important, and something that time should be spent on, like with NNAT test prep. They also get one on one time with their parents when you help them with their homework. Children need stability in their lives, and creating a reading hour every night or a weekly museum trip or daily NNAT test prep helps keep children balanced and focused on educational.

You know your child’s potential and how much they can succeed. But in order for them to be able to reach that potential, you need to be there helping them. You can find great activities for you to do with your child on this site. Good luck on the NNAT!

Fun Places for NNAT Test Prep

It can be hard to just do NNAT test prep in the home! You want your child to go out and explore the world and you want them to be involved in their community. But you also want them to study for the NNAT and get into that coveted Gifted and Talented program! How do you marry the two ideas and ensure that your child is exploring the world and also prepared for the NNAT? There are a lot of different, fun places to explore with your child that will also help them study for the NNAT! I have compiled a list below:

• Children’s Museum: Children’s museums are great because they are made for children to run through the halls! A lot of the displays are interactive, and allow your child to work on their visual spatial skills for the NNAT. There can be puzzles for your child to solve, using their serials reasoning skills for the NNAT! You can also be happy to see your child socialize with other children, or at least get out a lot of energy before you go home!
• Park: Parks are great because children naturally flock to them. They can place with other children and get to learn how to share. You can also take them on a scavenger hunt in the park! Ask them to find you all of the green items they can, or all of the square items they can. This helps teach them classification, a skill they will need on the NNAT!
• Zoo: Kids love the zoo, and that’s great because there is a lot of NNAT test prep that can go on in the zoo. Teach your child about genus and species and weave into that the skills of categorization. Both a parrot and a finch are categorized as birds. This is a skill the NNAT will test.

Have fun getting out there with your NNAT test prep! You can find other NNAT resources from this site. Good luck on the NNAT!

 

Snow Days for NNAT Prep

Snow days can be the bane of a parents existence, especially with the NNAT season coming up! Children are locked indoors and have no way to exercise their energy out of them! They can either tear the walls down or be placated by watching TV or movies! You do not want your children to waste their time in front of the tv screen but it can seem to be the most effective way to keep them entertained while stuck inside. However, there are educational websites that will help teach your child NNAT skills as well as keep them entertained. Allowing you to finish the laundry, start preparing dinner, or even get to sit down and read yourself. Here is a list of fun NNAT prep sites!

• Brain Pop: While this site is not NNAT specific, it has all the subjects and skills children need! The site is structured through videos that your children can be entertained by, teaching them about fractions, or about colors, or about the American Revolution! Then your child will be tested through an interactive quiz on the information in the video! Great to keep NNAT kids entertained and educated.
• Britannica School Edition: This isn’t your parents, or even your, encyclopedia! This has lessons on almost every subject written for specific age groups! This program is great because it grows up with your child, giving them a lesson on giraffes for an elementary reading level, another lesson on giraffes for a middle school reading level, going up to high school! If your child has any passion for a particular subject, you can have them write a research paper with the help of Britannica School Edition on a snowy day. Like Brain Pop, this does not specifically prepare your child for the NNAT but teaches them the skills behind it.

These sites, and many more like them, are great to inspire your child to be a lifelong learner, as well as do well on the NNAT! You can find these sites, and more, from this website. Good luck on the NNAT.

 

Volunteer Opportunities for NNAT Kids

While it may seem like the most important thing in your child’s life to prepare them for their NNAT test, you should encourage your children to volunteer. There are many different reasons why you should encourage your child to volunteer in their spare time, the least of which is because once it teaches responsibility. That responsibility can rub off on their NNAT practice and in their school life in general. You want to show your child that there is more than just NNAT prep. Volunteering with your child is also a great way to spend time together doing things other than NNAT prep. It also shows them that everyone should volunteer and it sets a good example for them.

• Convalescent Home: This is a great place for your children to volunteer, especially if one of their grandparents stay there. Your children can learn more than just NNAT prep, as they socialize with the elderly and hear their stories.
• Animal Shelter: This is a great place to teach your child empathy towards all living creatures on the planet and not just humans. Being able to empathize with anything helps them develop emotionally. School is not just about scoring well on the NNAT and getting into a great college. It is about maturing as a human being and growing up.
• Soup Kitchen or Food Bank: When I was a Girl Scout we would always save up some extra money to buy girl scout cookies that we donated to food banks. We would drop off the cookies at the food banks and get to interact with the people who volunteer there and use the food bank. It was an eye-opening experience for me and showed me that those are down on their luck and cannot find work are people too. You can show people working hard to get back on their feet and why it is good to be nice to everyone.

After you take a break from the NNAT practice to volunteer, your child can do NNAT test prep in the car home! You can check out the mobile offerings for test prep from this site. Good luck on the NNAT!

Shy Children and the NNAT

If you are a parent of a shy child then you have more to worry about for the NNAT than just test prep. For Kindergarten admission, children are alone with the proctor for the NNAT exam. For many children, this can be a very scary experience. For shy children, this can negatively impact their NNAT scores. There are a lot of misconceptions on shy children, and a lot of ways that parents can help their shy children, and help their shy child do better on the NNAT test. Here are some tips below on how to handle your shy child:

• Do not tell them they are shy: Children often lack a vocabulary to describe the world around them and that is where parents step in. You tell them that the baba they are reaching for is a bottle and you tell them the orange ball is a basketball and you teach them NNAT test prep. However, if you notice your child is more reserved or private, do not tell them they are shy. Children often already know what the word shy means, and it can make them even more self-conscious of their shy nature. Try the word “reserved” or “private” instead to help children understand themselves better.
• Help them form strategies: Once you determine why your child does not want to sit with the proctor for the NNAT exam, you can help them form strategies. Are they nervous about meeting a new person? Are they anxious that they are in a building they have never seen before? Do they not want to leave you, their parents? Once you know the answer you can help them overcome their issue.
• They are not alone: While we are seemingly a nation of extroverts, there is a large portion of the nation that is shy. Look online and find other shy people who went on to have incredibly successful lives! Share these stories with your children and show them how they can succeed with their shyness. Their shyness can even help them on the NNAT!

You can find more resources on shy children from this site. Good luck on the NNAT!