Look at Sonlight for lit-based (Bookshark for secular version) and Timberdoodle for hands-on/STEM type stuff. I'm planning a combo of those for my 3-year-old this fall. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I don't even know what "kindergarten-ready" means. I wouldn't expect kids going into kindergarten to know anything - that's what kindergarten is FOR. (Preschool is not mandatory in our state, and kindergarten only became mandatory two years ago.) That said, I agree the surprise and unusualness of the test is probably a lot of it for both kids. Just because your kids didn't test well when they weren't ready to be tested (and maybe hadn't been tested formally before, which is FINE) doesn't mean you're a failure! Testing is way overrated.

On the one hand, it sounds like you're looking for etymology - how our current words have evolved over time from other languages and roots. Here's the entry for "knife" on the Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=knife&allowed_in_frame=0 The Story of English is a great book/video series about how English has changed over time, thanks to Roman, Saxon, Viking, and French invasions, as well as the continual borrowing from other languages since then. It's particularly helpful to see why English often has two or more words for the same thing (often because Saxons used a Germanic word for it and the French conquerors used a French word for it, and both have become common in English). But ultimately you're going to get to the end of the etymology chain and it's going to say "from the Proto-Germanic knibaz of uncertain origin" (that's knife) or "from the Greek whatever" and there's no info before that. If the question is more existential than "where did this English word come from" I'm not sure how to answer that. Sometime back before recorded history someone started calling a thing some name and it stuck and everyone else started using it, and over time it became the word we know today - and of course, in other parts of the world, things have different names because either their ancestors came up with different names initially, or because their languages have evolved differently over time from a common source.

This is a really good and helpful distinction.

I'm coming up to this for the first time with my 3-year-old - I'd read some of the things saying learning to read at 6 or 7 was as good or better than learning younger, so I was fully prepared to wait until then (even though I learned to read at 4; I don't even remember not knowing how to read), but my daughter is fascinated with letters and numbers. She points them out everywhere, on our shirts, on signs, in books, makes Ts and Xs and Vs with coffee stirrers at Starbucks, etc. So I'm kind of gently introducing letter sounds and stuff as she's interested - we'll see where we end up. She's not one for drilling or working on stuff like this in a structured way, so I'm not even trying anything formal. The one thing that I'm now stressing about is all the things I'm seeing (here and elsewhere) that kids should learn the sounds of letters before the names. It's already too late for that! She already knows all the names and can identify them all (capitals anyway; she doesn't know the lower-case ones yet).

LOL, any potty training optimism I had went right out the window with my FIRST experience! Truly the most frustrating part of being a parent so far - my daughter is a few months into 3 and she's MOSTLY got it now, but once in a while she'll have a day or two with accidents everywhere. She gets so involved in whatever she's doing she forgets to pay attention to potty needs until it's too late.

I currently use a secondary Goodreads account that I manage for my preschooler, but since it's largely picture books and lots of repeats, it's not really complete. I just try to remember to do it as I take books back to the library. I'll get more intentional about it as she gets older. I'll pass it over to her (or let her use a journal or something if she prefers - I'm personally enjoying my pen-and-paper log this year, though I still also use Goodreads) when she's older and wants to do it herself. And if she doesn't, that's fine, too. I'm an inveterate list maker and I wish SO MUCH I had a list of everything I read before I started keeping track myself in high school. I can do that for her, so if she cares, she'll have it. I also track her movies on Letterboxd, which is awesome because it allows for logging rewatches (though I don't always track the hundreds of times she watches things at this age!). I love some of the other ideas here! Will definitely be printing out that visual bookshelf when I can! That's a cool way to visualize what you've read in a year. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk