Tips on What to Do When Your Child Resists Working With Questions

This is when we would offer incentives.
We’d try games and activities suggested in Testing For Kindergarten or in TestingMom’s practice section for Stanford-Binet – outside activities that we knew were helpful for testing, but that were different from what was on the site – puzzles, parquetry blocks, Mighty Mind, memory games, vocabulary games, etc.
We’d pull out her favorite game ever – the IQ Fun Pack. Even now after her test has passed, she still wants to play it with me.
I’d give him a break, a little TLC, and some small “bribes” such as, we’ll go to the playground after this session or you can watch an extra episode of Arthur.
Don’t push. My children love TestingMom. If they didn’t want to do it, I knew there was usually a reason. Sometimes it was because the exercises got more challenging. When that is the case, just take small steps.

This never happened to us – we were lucky that our son was motivated and really enjoyed doing the practice materials.
If this happened, I knew she was tired. So I made sure to do our practice sessions when she was full or energy or at the beginning of the day.
I would tell him, “let’s just do 5 questions and then he could go play.” That worked for him.
When questions got too hard for my daughter, we would go back and do easier questions to give her confidence to push forward.
My son always loved it. But if I found that he wasn’t focused at the start, we’d go back to an activity that he liked the most and make it a short session.

We never got this because there were so many different ways to present questions on the TestingMom site. Skill Building Academy was an awesome addition.
Bribing her always worked. It could be a simple bribe.
Challenging and praising her was a motivator.
If she didn’t want to do questions, we’d skip them. Later, I’d offer to do some questions with, and then we could read a favorite story or play a favorite game.
Take a break!

If she wasn’t interested, I’d listen to her and we’d stop. Or we would take a break and continue the next day.
We always encouraged her, but never forced her. Most days, she loved doing practice tests.
We’d let her know there were not many questions left and there were would be chocolate milk or another small reward waiting for her when she was finished.
We would compromise. If she did 10 questions, she could have 10 minutes of free time to do what she wanted.
My son never resisted. We have a balanced schedule of academics, athletics and fun, so this work was never too much for him.

We’d push a little, but if he still resisted, we’d stop and wait for a better time.
If my child resisted, we’d switch from “standard” practice questions to a game format. We’d also shorten the practice time.
I would encourage them with “just 5-more minutes and then we can do Play-dough” or an activity of their choice.
Let it go…try again tomorrow.
Children may resist if 1) they get burnt out. I made sure that there were days off between practice that she could earn if she worked on the material consistently, and 2) they don’t get most of the answers right. When that happened, I had my daughter work on questions she had already worked on. When she worked on them a second time, she got more answers right, which boosted her confidence and made her want to keep going.