Are you a parent who has a student preparing for the OLSAT exam in second grade? And are you wondering what you can do to help your student prepare and what are some resources you might use to do so?
When my son was in second grade, or even earlier than that when he was in first grade, and I knew he was taking this test in second grade, I wanted to help him prepare. I wanted to know what resources are out there and how I am going to help him prepare. I looked for a YouTube video, and I couldn’t find it. So, as a YouTuber and test prep expert, I decided now that I’ve gone through this journey with my son and now that I’m teaching an OLSAT class, I’m going to share what I’ve learned with you all to try to help you prepare your students for the OLSAT Level C second-grade test. I know many of you out there are probably sending your kids to Los Angeles Unified, and this is the test that LA Unified uses to identify gifted students.
Why does gifted matter? Well, if you are identified as gifted, you can become part of the GATE program in LAUSD. And once you’re in, you’re in. So, that means how your student performs on a test in second grade can determine whether they can apply to gifted middle school programs, gifted high school programs, or gifted high schools, and even get into AP classes. I know that sounds ridiculous. Second grade performance on a nonverbal test can get you into AP classes. Don’t shoot the messenger. But in any case, to me, it is the easiest way to get into the gifted program at LAUSD. There are other ways you can get in, through high scores in the SBAC two years in a row. You have to do it twice, but on the OLSAT, you just have to do it once.
What score does your student need in order to qualify for the gifted program? You need to be at the 95th percentile or above for most students. In certain socioeconomic groups, you could be at the 90th percentile or above. What does that look like? Well, the OLSAT is graded not according to how many questions you got right overall. It’s not like you need 95% of the questions right, and then you’re in. You have to beat out 95% of other students at your grade level. That’s a little bit different. And it can be a little bit harder to read. I know one of the questions I had as a parent is how many can my kid miss and still be okay, right? His first practice test, I think he was missing 16 or 17 questions. If he had walked in that day, he would not have gotten the gifted status that he now has because he studied. So, it’s totally possible to study. It’s totally possible to help your student improve on this, but you can’t miss 15 questions.
How many can you miss? From chatting with other friends who’ve had students take this exam in the last couple of years, six to eight questions is about how many you could miss and still be qualified in that 95th percentile or above. And if you score even higher than that, I think in the top 1%—and I’m not 100% sure what gets you this invite—but basically if you score really high on the exam, you get invited by LAUSD to then take a test with a psychologist where they try to see if you are in the top one-half of 1% and qualify as either highly gifted applicable or highly gifted. “Highly gifted” means you’re in the 99.9th percentile of students. “Highly gifted applicable” means you’re in the 99.5 to 99.8% tile. And that test has to be done with a psychologist, but you get an automatic invite if you do really well on the OLSAT. How well do you have to do to get that invite? My son’s year, you could miss three or four, kind of depending on what month your kid was born. If they were born in the summer, we’re talking four questions. If they were born earlier, maybe it’s three. And I’m not exactly sure where that line lands. This is a hearsay estimate, gossip, not truth with a capital T. So take it with a grain of salt, but at least it gives you a ballpark because I couldn’t find any, and nobody’s talking about this on Reddit.
So that’s kind of where we were goal-wise. I wanted to get my son to a place for someone who was getting just a few wrong. Now I know that’s three to four wrong, and we’d be good. And so how did I do that? Well, the first thing I wanted to do was figure out what good materials are out there. And I will say there are a lot of books. There are also online resources. If your kid is taking this on a computer, which my son did in LAUSD, I would recommend using computer programs to prep for the test for sure. But you may also want to pair that with books because, let’s be honest, as parents, it’s much easier to just throw a book in front of your kid than to get them logged into a computer and keep them off Geometry Dash.
Book Reviews
I’m going to do a quick book review and talk through the resources that we used and what I found most helpful. These four books are currently available on Amazon. Please note this list includes Amazon affiliate links, which help support our blog and free YouTube Videos. No one has paid us to sponsor or include any books on this list.
If you were going to buy one book, Gifted and Talented OLSAT Test Prep is probably my favorite. I will warn you, though; my kid’s teacher used this in her class. So we did this book, but we did it like a year and a half in advance, and I didn’t even know the teacher was going to use this book. So we had already burned through it. What I love about this book is that it is one of the few books out there that does not print the practice question set above every single question. The question itself will say, “Look at the first picture. Miriam has two cupcakes.” And then, it will tell you the question. And as a parent, you can rip it out of the back and then read it to your kid to simulate the actual test. That idea of simulating the actual test I really like here. It’s not all the questions in here, but there’s a good number. So you could actually practice like they play where it is read aloud. And that’s how the real test works. And it’s one of the things that makes the test difficult. Because teachers are not allowed to reread the question more than one time, which is the most difficult thing about the OLSAT. To prepare your kid for that, you’ve got to find a resource that allows you to simulate that. This is the closest I have. When it comes to these other books, I end up doing this, scribbling out all the questions, handing that to my kid, and then reading it from the book, which was kind of a pain. But you know, you do what you do when you’re a parent.
2. 2 Practice Tests for the OLSAT Grade 2 Level C
3. Mercer Publishing’s Practice Test for the OLSAT Level C
2 Practice Tests for the OLSAT Grade 2 Level C and Mercer Publishing’s Practice Test for the OLSAT Level C are both pretty good. They’re also much easier if you want your kid to just read the questions themselves and do them themselves because you have to cook dinner. Leading into the test from about December through March, when they gave the exam, we were probably trying to do a test a week. We didn’t always succeed, but we did what we could to get him ready.
4. OLSAT Grade 2 Workbook & Sample Test
OLSAT Grade 2 Workbook & Sample Test is newer. I didn’t actually use this with my son, but I’m teaching an OLSAT class right now, and I bought it just to kind of see. I like the math questions, but I thought some of the other ones were a little too easy.
5. 6 Practice Tests for the Olsat Grade 2: Grade 2, Level C by Nicole Howard
Speaking of too easy, there’s one other resource, which is the Nicole Howard book. It has six tests in it, which is a ton of material. If you notice, all of these are silly thin. They only have two practice tests in them. The Nicole Howard book is huge. It has six practice tests. And in fact, if you buy the Kindle version, it’s only three bucks, which is only 50 cents a practice test. So, if you’re on a budget, check out the Nicole Howard. But the Nicole Howard does have some typos. It has some questions that are dodgy. It is somewhere where I would say there’s more than one right answer choice that I found as I’ve worked through the book. There’s also a bonus set that you can print out that’s in a PDF that comes with her book, which is a nice perk. So she’s got tons of questions. There are a few typos and mistakes in there at this point. Maybe she’ll update them because I know with the Kindle publishing, as I have published with Kindle, you can update things when you have typos. And I’m totally sympathetic because I have written my own material, and I know how hard it is to weed out typos, especially when you’re taking on a massive undertaking of trying to get six tests’ worth of material. So it still could be valuable, but I do find it a little bit easy. So if you are going to do the long haul of prep, if you have a first grader or a kindergartner, give them a Nicole Howard book. It’s got mistakes, it’s not perfect, but it’s a ton of material. And then you can kind of save the better material for when your kid is older.
Digital Materials
Let’s talk digital materials. There are two digital platforms that I purchased that I really liked. The first is called Elm Academy. I really like the questions. I thought the difficulty level matched the difficulty level of the actual test. He took one the week before the test, and it was similar to his performance on the actual test. So, I felt like that was accurately portraying the challenge level of the real thing. It also has some lessons and things. If you’re a parent and you don’t know what test prep tips to give, it has some pretty good advice overall. The one thing about Elm Academy I did not like is that you cannot—or at least last year, I don’t know about it this year—review material except for immediately after it’s been done. So, if your kid takes the practice test, you have to review it immediately after they do it. And if you are going to prep your kid for this test, one of the most important things that you do is have them do practice and then go over what they miss and figure out what they did wrong and how they are going to do it right the next time.
A second tip, in addition to just buying a bunch of books and going through them, is to try to find a book that goes through each practice question type one at a time and gives you some tips for how to approach each one. It’s good to review the same type of question all in a row so you can learn patterns and learn techniques that apply to each particular question type. Elm Academy is going to do that. And I think that’s just a natural way to prep. You focus on one question type at a time. You kind of go over that question type, master it, and move on. And then after you sort of master each question type, you can put it all together and then take practice tests. So Elm Academy, you have to go over it right away, which is the downside.
If I could only pay for one online product, I probably would do Test Prep-Online. I’m actually using it right now with the group class that I’m teaching. If you’re a teacher, they have a teacher pack you can buy as well. They also have a family plan. If you have more than one student, you can buy several subscriptions at once. And within their platform, they do have a video academy. So again, if you’re a parent and you don’t know quite how to teach, you could use that. And the video academy is pretty good. It has well-structured lessons that really explain how to approach a question and how questions work. They also have pretty good practice drills in addition to two full practice tests. So again, I would start with the drills, focus on one question type at a time, do a lesson on that, or go through their PDF packet. Look at the type, then do those sets, go over those sets, learn from your mistakes, finish all that, and then do practice tests and kind of see where you’re at.
I also think it’s good to do a practice test at the beginning of all this to kind of get a baseline of how many you are missing so that you can see growth and improvement over time. But because there are so few online tests that I like—there are only four—I might suggest taking the baseline test on paper and then moving to the online one.
Why do I like Test Prep-Online and Elm Academy the best? Both of them have this feature where there’s audio in this little box, and you can play it. She will read the question aloud and really simulate that experience of testing. What I told my son when he did these as practice is to not let himself replay anything and to only play it once so that we can simulate what it’s going to be like on test day. And to me, again, that’s the thing about the majority of these books out there. It just does not simulate testing in that same listening way. So I really love that about these two.
The third resource online, Visuprep, has an online OLSAT program. It does not have this audio feature. At least the last time I looked at it, it did not. And so I did not purchase Visuprep because I didn’t want my student reading from the page. I wanted them listening to the audio as it is on the real test.
General Tips
Finally, in the third part of this video, I’m going to get into some general tips for how to excel at the OLSAT. From a test prep expert, what are some general tips that you can share with your students to ensure that they do well on the test? As I mentioned before, it is really important that you listen carefully on this test because teachers are only going to read each question once. So, a couple of strategies to deal with that. One is to write down as much as possible. Your kids should always be taking notes; even if they’re taking the test on a computer, they will be given scratch paper and a pencil to take notes and write things down because it can’t be repeated. It’s really important that they get any details down that they’re having trouble remembering or juggling while they think or process. That being said, sometimes it’s faster to visually eliminate on screen. When you have things like that, you might be able to eliminate a couple while listening and remembering and then take a note for the third thing.
There is a balance, though. I have seen some students who, when they write everything down, actually may not perform as well because they’re then just trying to remember what their notes mean, and if they had sort of eliminated as they listened, they may have been a little bit more efficient. So two kinds of strategies there. You can work with your student to see which one or which combination works for them, but I would always say if it feels like there are a lot of details coming down the line, start to write things down. And especially in the math questions, I would at least write initials. If they say Matt has three pieces of pizza, I would rate M and three, right? So that you can kind of shorthand what’s going on. And that’s another tip for students beyond my two listening tips: to use abbreviations or quick sketches. So if the teacher’s reading, and Matt has three pieces of pizza, I might draw a triangle with a three in it and an M over it, right? We want a shorthand. We don’t want to write things out all the way. We don’t want super detailed drawings; we want quick and efficient.
My third tip is students shouldn’t rush. Some of the biggest mistakes that I see from students are because of them rushing. Most teachers in LAUSD want their kids to do really well on this. Guess what? That means they aren’t rushing. They’re giving students time to do the problem. So, I encourage you at home to have your students sit and keep thinking if they’re not 100% sure of the answer right away, not guess.
The fourth tip is to make sure to check every answer choice before choosing your answer choice. One of the biggest mistakes that students make is they might see an analogy problem and think, “Oh, horse is to horseshoe as boy is to,” and they might think “hat.” A boy wears a hat, and a horse wears a horseshoe. But if they keep looking at the answer choices, they might find “shoe” is answer choice D, and a shoe is more similar to a horseshoe. And so that would be the correct answer instead of a hat. But if students move too quickly, they may make associations or analogies and think theirs is good and move on. So always consider every answer choice.
My next tip is to predict. A lot of the questions on the OLSAT may have patterns or analogies. When we have an analogy, you want to predict the answer before you look at the answer choices. Same with patterns. You’re going to see the pattern and dissect and analyze it. And then you’re going to predict what you’re going to find before you look at the answer choices. And the same thing with analogies.
My next tip is that with analogies, you should be making up a sentence that relates the two objects in the first pair of information. The next question type I want to talk about is when we have “which one doesn’t belong” questions. And my best advice on those is to think about the main attributes of an object. One of the mistakes that students make is they’ll say, “Oh, all of these objects have a circle shape in them.” And that’s not the kind of logic we want to use when it’s actual objects from the world. We would rather think, “All of these are a slice of something, and this is a whole.” You have a whole loaf of bread, a slice of bread, a slice of cake, a slice of pie, and a slice of cheese. So, slices don’t fit with a whole loaf. And that’s the thing. I’m not looking for something crazy, like “The Swiss cheese has circles, and the slice of cake has a circular cherry on top.” When we get into weird things like that, it can be dangerous. So make sure to focus on the main attributes of objects.
I hope you guys like this blog and that it was helpful! If you’re in LA and you’re looking for in-person OLSAT prep, you can check us out at supertutorTV.com/elementary or email us at info@supertutorTV.com to see if we have any classes running. Thanks for reading, and I wish you the best of luck!
