Crush The COGAT Part 2

I've been getting a lot of feedback from parents waking up to the demands of the GAT tests.   I'm especially interested with parents who are just finding out what this is all about and parents of older children who might be taking this test again.  But before I get to the older children, let me ramble on as usual off topic about little kids and phonics.

Lately I've been hard at work on my latest super secret project involving phonics.   The only reason why I ever did phonics in the first place was because I was shocked to find that kids in GAT programs read 3 or 4 years ahead and I was sending to this classroom - think a den of lions - a child who was just beginning to read.   I knew that the test doesn't involve reading, but I also knew that a big vocabulary is key to the test, and reading helps.  I was complaining to a friend at work who introduced me to the GAT concept, and she responded by giving me a very old hooked on phonics set.  I think she paid $250.

We didn't use most of the material that justified the $250 cost because I also was bringing home 20 to 30 books a week from the library, sorting and cataloging them, and using whichever ones best met the need for that week.   The phonics set wasn't my child's introduction to the wonder of reading, it was the introduction to the sounds on the word lists.  I started to expand it and created my own approach specifically designed to get the child ready to begin test prep.  The fact that he emerged a strong reader was a big bonus, and in the end, his reading skills continue to accelerate.

To determine whether there is an approach to phonics similar to mine, I've been buying phonics books.  It appears that phonics books target the 50 percentile and lower.   One book in particular stands out.  It is "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" by Siegfried Englemann.  This book is specifically designed for kids who are behind, and in my opinion, parents who are behind as well.  I really like the approach, because it's similar to the approach I put in my math books, which is to coach the parents.  Unfortunately, we're on different ends of the academic spectrum, and his market is much bigger than mine.

In addition to phonics, we tackled figure matrices with a vengeance.    I never met one I considered hard enough, and if we had to sit there for 45 minutes doing a single problem, getting it wrong 15 times, it didn't put me off in the slightest.  As we plodded through Building Thinking skills volume 1 through 3, we would get to the verbal sections - actual words and sentences - and we would stop because I determined it was too hard and not worth it.   Our target test, after all, was nonverbal.  But we plodded along with enough of it, apparently.

This brings me to older kids.  I've talked about an approach that is heavy on the quantitate section to gain a competitive advantage.  In retrospect, you can't go light on any parts of the test and get above 95%.  You can really gain a big competitive advantage on the verbal section.  I'm not sure how to phrase this without being overly technical, but I'm speculating that a competitive advantage on the verbal section might outweigh a competitive advantage on the quantitate section.

The test is a year away.   This is the time for Building Thinking Skills - with an emphasis on the verbal section.  Maybe you still have these lying around and you skipped most of it like I did.   I'm shocked to find readers who haven't heard of Vocabulary Workshop - my secret weapon which I've written on extensively and shouldn't be a secret anymore.   We only did 2 pages of Vocabulary Workshop each Saturday, and posted tricky words to the refrigerator.  

The next thing you need is a strong reading list and a daily minimum of 30 minutes of reading. Until the child reads for 30 minutes (and possible a page of Building Thinking Skills), no TV, computers, fun, desert or anything else. The right reading list will make this minimum irrelevant to your child. I'm more than happy to recommend a list of books depending on reading level, but two identical children will have completely different preferences for reading material.   We can all agree that boys should all read the youth series-es by James Patterson.  This will be critical for material non-readers and reading junk food for advanced readers.  This should be followed by everything from Roald Dahl and Kate Dicamillo for both boys and girls.  Everything else is a matter of taste.

To summarize, you need four things:
#1  Building Thinking Skills
#2  Vocabulary Workshop
#3  A reading list
#4  A determined parent with the right approach

The fourth thing is the most critical, and this is a parent willing to turn her house into a GAT house, with lots of books and conversation, but no TV, computers, phones, or video games.  The kids aren't buried in a workbook or book all day, but when they're not studying, the kids are doing something that is not passive.   The pace of work also changes, from lots of easy problems and disappointment with wrong answers, to more complicated work that takes longer to do a single problem, where wrong answers happen more often than correct answers and the parent really doesn't care.  I'm doing well at the "doesn't care" part, which doesn't come naturally to me, but not so good on the "no video games" part because the kids' work is phenomenal if it is a prerequisite of video game time.

I am frequently asked to prescribe the right workbook, and given enough information, I am more than happy to do so.  I'm like a librarian and I often go to my bookshelf and page through books to verify my initial reaction.   But I often worry that a workbook in the hands of an impatient parent with expectations for accuracy is going to be a disaster.   While your children are working on becoming GAT kids, you can work on becoming a GAT parent.