Does anybody really know...

Doing a lot of assessment this week. Of course, Prestigius doesn't administer Satan's test, the TAKS, but we do have benchmarks and goals we need the kids to meet. By now, with less than twenty school days left in the year (how the hell did that happen?) the kindergarteners are expected to:

• identify all major money and its value
• count by twos and fives to at least fifty
• create and extend three-part patterns
• read simple phonetic words in isolation
• recognize several sight words
• do addition and subtraction sentences with and without models
• identify the main idea of a story, its characters, and setting
• come up with rhyming words and opposites
• write all the lowercase letters without a model
• tell the time in hours and half hours
• understand one-half, one-third, and one-fourth
• recognize the place values of three-digit numbers
• and so forth and so on...

Most of my kids are reading at exceptionally high levels, so I've been spending most of my time finding out how much they've picked up in math. I was surprised to find that a lot of them, although they could tell the time easily, didn't know which was the hour hand or the minute hand. How do they know what time it is, then? I guess that shows they don't really understand how the clock works, they've just memorized the positions.