By USDR
In our current educational landscape, it’s likely that every kindergartner will be tested within the first few months of school. As an author and testing authority, Karen Quinn, founder of TestingMom.com, has a long history of helping kids succeed in school. Now she’s developed an interactive board game called IQ Fun Pack to help young kids develop the skills needed to succeed on admissions and gifted and talented tests and throughout their academic careers.
The game is available from TestingMom.com for $297.00. “At first glance that price may seem high, but it’s far less expensive than private tutors, after-school education programs or academic camps,” said Michael McCurdy, Dad blogger for the popular New York City Gifted and Talented blog and Co-founder of TestingMom.com. Parents with yearly memberships in TestingMom.com education site can get $100 off the game.
“Concerned parents will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy homes in certain school districts to ensure their kids’ academic success. This game will build the actual abilities kids need to qualify for gifted programs in any school district or to test into a private school,” continued McCurdy. “It’s a great investment in your child’s educational future – and you don’t have to move!”
While testing young children may cause concern and anxiety for kids and parents, Quinn says parents can help their kids succeed with fun games and activities. According to Quinn, standardized cognitive tests measure nine key abilities: language, listening, memory, mathematics, knowledge, visual-spatial, thinking, pre-reading and fine motor skills.
Quinn has analyzed the tests given throughout the country, broken down the skills and abilities needed to succeed, and built them into IQ Fun Pack to help three to six year olds get kindergarten and test ready through hands-on, mostly offline play. The game is an enhanced, interactive version of the previously released IQ Fun Park, which was launched in 2010, and sold out due to high demand.
IQ Fun Pack is for involved parents who want to do learning activities with their children while limiting online exposure. Only the questions used while playing the game are online – everything else is hands-on, offline. Kids ages three to six are expected to master a specific set of skills before arriving at kindergarten. IQ Fun Pack covers them all in ways that feels like play to children.
IQ Fun Pack is unique in that it is an off-line board game experience combined with an online interface for questions. To play, kids answer questions modeled after those on early childhood tests as they move their space baby along the Rainbow Path to get him back to his home planet in time for dinner. Questions are pulled from an online interface, which can handle an unlimited number of questions. On release, the game has over 10,000 questions. The Fun Pack includes 25+ games in one, with three game boards, including one for the “Are You Smarter than a Space Baby” game where kids can show off how much they know!
Quinn’s mission is to help all families support their children so they can succeed in school, regardless of income level. “I want all parents to know that it is possible for every family, even those who cannot afford expensive tutors or enrichment activities, to provide their children with a good academic start,” she says. “Practicing these nine skills at home through play-based games will help kids not only on tests, but throughout school and life.”
Quinn knows from experience the impact a parent can have on a child’s school success. When her son Sam was three, he was given an IQ test and scored in the 37th percentile. A doctor told her that Sam would never be able to function in a regular classroom. Luckily, Karen’s mother had her PhD in Early Childhood Education. She helped Karen understand the abilities Sam needed to develop to do well on an IQ test and, more importantly, in kindergarten. “Every night for about a year I worked with him for a half-hour or so. They secret to my success was I didn’t make it seem like work – he thought we were just playing.”
At age four, Sam was tested again and this time he scored in the 94th percentile and was accepted into a top private school in Manhattan. “I can’t promise this will happen with your child, but what I can promise is that a little work disguised as fun every day will make an enormous difference in a child’s test and school performance, said Quinn. “Whether you’re working on language, memory, listening, math, knowledge, thinking, visual-spatial, pre-reading or fine-motor skills, IQ Fun Pack will make it fun. They won’t even know they’re learning.”
Find out more information about IQ Fun Pack or to order the game.
About TestingMom.com
TestingMom.com is a Web site that helps pre-K to 8th graders build skills for school success and ace important tests, such as the CogAT test, OLSAT test, GATE test, NNAT-2 test, and many others.
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