What to do if you know your child is especially anxious.... This can be very challenging... and it´s not unusual that a homeschool
mom may be especially anxious about their child´s level of anxiety, compounding the problem! I´ve had 3rd graders come to testing worried that if they don´t do ´perfectly´ then they´ll have to immediately go to public school... or worse! Sometimes these are kids who in a sense are actually ´realistic´-- they realize that they are having real challenges with learning to read or do math work, and maybe after doing
Scoring High activities, they realize this even more. If you know that your child is *markedly* behind in core abilities in reading (say, your entering 3rd grader is still having to ´sound out´ simple one-syllable words like ´cat´ or ´tree´ or ´clock´, and who is NOT yet at all ready to be able to read a 3-paragraph story with some independence), then you might want to re-think testing for this fall. Some families have even ´re-thought´ their child´s grade level, opting to call the child an entering 2nd grader instead-- later on, as the child catches up, a ´double promotion´ can be discussed with their evaluator. I´ve had situations where very anxious kids who were basically non-readers, burst into tears in the very first sections of the 3rd grade test (the easy parts!). This is not only VERY upsetting to this child, making them feel inadequate and embarrassed and ashamed in front of the other children, but it´s also very upsetting to the other children-- kids are distracted and concerned when a child starts crying, want to try to help the child out, and feel helpless to do anything. This child might do better with some type of individual testing until they gain greater skills. But there are also some kids who are doing fine (or at least ´very OK´) who get very anxious. Their ´self-talk´ is all along these lines: "Ooooh, I´m so nervous!!! Ooooh, I´m worried I won´t have enough time!!! Ooooh, I´m going to fail this, I know!!!" If you can sense that your child is starting to think like this, I´d suggest intervening with some
positive ways of thinking! Again, with young children a light-hearted way is often best, maybe with a loved toy pretending to be very anxious about testing, and the child trying to help him feel more confident. Try helping your child learn to instead say things like this in their heads: "Hmmm, I may meet some questions I´m not sure about, but I´ll bet I´ll be able to really think my way through them! Hmmm, I may get some math questions that I´m not sure how to approach-- that´s ok... and I´ll bet I´ll be able to tackle most questions! Hmmm, I may feel worried that I won´t finish on time, but I´ll bet that right then I´ll actually work with just the right speed and have plenty of time to even check over my work!" Some parents and teachers have also found that the simple technique of EFT Tapping (´emotional freedom technique´ tapping) can be very helpful if kids seem worried about testing situations--this actually helped my little 8 year old granddaughter this past summer when I gave her an achievement test to meet a requirement of the state of Virginia homeschool law. She calmed right down and did super! See
http://eft4kids.emofree.com/ for discussion on this topic.