BrillKids Forum

Hey Everyone,

I have a very important question. I would love to know your honest thoughts on testingmom.com, My daughter is 5 and an early learner, she is incredibly smart. I plan on having her take the gifted and talented test on January 31st (just to see how she does, I am still unsure about whether I am going to continue to home school or not.) however she has never taken an actual test before, so I wanted to get her ready for it in some way. I was searching for a way and came across the Testingmom.com now I am trying to conduct some research because I don't want to waste money (cause honestly I don't have the money to waste however if it is going to help her then I will fork it over and figure it out). I am leaning more towards NO at the moment because whatever I do find isn't singing its praises. I searched the forum here and only  found a thread that shared a coupon but when I saw other posts I saw a lady has issues with billing, I found they have some complaints on the BBB which you can see here http://www.bbb.org/.../testingmomcom-in.../complaints as well as this review on a blog http://www.getyourchildintogat.com/.../review-of-testing... which I cannot tell if it is a good service or a complete waste of $ oh and then I just found this review http://squishablebaby.com/testingmom-com-helps-parents.../ Still would love to hear if one of you have tried it out and what you think billing issues aside. Soo if anyone has any information that could help me I would really, really appreciate it!

I bought it and I'm not using it.  The site is not easy to use. It consists of logging into other programs with passwords provided from testing mom.  Also, you cannot print out the tests and activities.  They have to be done online.  You're better off buying a book with the exercises or printing exercises off the web and doing them.  I would not get it again.  I bought a one year membership

Thank you! I have heard more negative than positive so I am grateful I didn't impulsively purchase it because I was headed that way!
Thank you again!

There is an app. But it is glitchy. I did print out a bunch of stuff from the site. But to be honest we really don't use a lot of it. It is not an easy place to navigate.
Now they do have a lot of extra stuff that makes the subscription worth it for us. I got it with hefty discounts. So I paid $60 something for a year. My son uses the Brain Pop and Brain Pop Jr apps almost daily. It is chaper to get a subscription to testing mom for the year than to subscribe via Brain Pop.
There are other amazing things on the site. Lots of access to books. But because we use the iPad primarily, we don't take advantage of all the great books. If there was an app for all the extra features we should would use them.

Thank you for your opinion...where did you get the discounts??   :D  It is currently on sale and I would be interested in it if I could get it for 60 $ lol My daughter has a free trial of brain pop and loves it so yeah I saw that and I was like ohh even if it sucks that is worth it but then I read so many negatives I don't know.

I waited for a sale and googled coupon codes. Even if I could remember the codes I used I don't think they would work now.

I was thinking of getting access a few months ago and was talking to someone who had. I had already bought and read her book "testing for kindergarten" at that time. My friend told me not to bother with the full access. I think you can really get the gist of what they do from her very affordable book and just use typical apps and workbooks for things like pattern recognition, fine motor skills, sorting and matching and lots of dialogical reading to build up vocabulary.

I must say even if it was helpful, as a psychologist myself I do actually have a problem with what she is doing in terms of publicising IQ test questions, it borders on the unethical in my opinion. You are really not supposed to access these tests and publicise the nature of the questions as it defeats the whole purpose of the test.

I KNOW! I studied psychology and that was a big issue for me as well, it was something I had learned in school that you never ever share those questions because it makes the test invalid. When I saw that they had the Standford- Binet Tests, I was like that shouldn't be allowed!

We've been using TestingMom for almost a year now and have found it to be extremely helpful to our daughter, Sydney, who is dyslexic.  It challenges her and boosts her confidence, as she does the practice questions.  I noticed they took down their passwords recently, too.  The games and tools have been useful for us here in the Smith home.   I think it's a great way to engage your child in learning while having FUN, which is so important to us.  Hope this helps!

Blessings,
Holly

I'm very glad that you have such a talented daughter! Let grows clever!