I’m not pregnant with twins.

That’s what my friend first thought when I posted a photo of a pair of positive covid tests my husband recorded.

He did two tests because he couldn’t quite believe the double red line.

The virus finally caught up with our family. So we’ve been at home for a week in “iso”. Not terrible. A bit scary. Mostly strange. For two years, I have heard about, talked about, asked about, written about, I think I’ve dreamt about this virus and now it’s in my house.

My sons are double vaxxed and they tested negative. I’m triple vaxxed and I tested negative. My husband felt fine almost immediately after a dose of ibruprofen. How fortunate we are and how different it might have been without the vaccine. Thank you science.

So we cancelled everything. And bounced around at home. We played a lot of ping pong. The boys finally found time to watch the never ending Star Wars movies.

Fortunately I still produced my radio show, so I had an excuse not to watch the never ending Star Wars movies. Mind you I did get pretty good at lightsaber fighting.

I also did NAPLAN.

That’s not a sentence I expected to write in 2022.

My eldest son is in grade five and might do NAPLAN this year if it doesn’t get cancelled again. He missed out in grade three because of pandemic interruptions in 2020. That feels like such a long time ago, yet here we are wondering how this new wave of the virus will disrupt life again.

NAPLAN isn’t a big deal at my son’s school and I’m grateful for the tone set by the Principal which seems to be to do your best, but don’t stress.

I was still interested to click on the public demonstration site and do some of the tasks. Every year there’s a debate about the National Assessment Program pros and cons. This year, I finally opened the NAPLAN site that anyone can access.

So what’s it all about? Reading, Writing and Numeracy. Arithmetic if you want use the “old skool” slogan. It’s a series of online questions and tasks that I have to be honest, seemed reasonable.

The writing task was called “Don’t waste it”.

Write to persuade a reader why something you care about should not be wasted or thrown away. Choose something you think should be reused or kept forever. Start with an introduction, write your opinions and finish with a conclusion.

You’re given 40 minutes to write. My son wrote about the Amazon Rainforest! He used lots of exclamation marks!! Would the assessors see that as 10 year old enthusiasm or mark him down. I didn’t care, I was just glad he had a go!!!

The reading task was a series of questions about short stories featuring Boots the Cat, the school garden and cake baking. Each involved comprehending text and answering questions in word and picture form.

For example “place the following events in the order in which they happened in the text.”

The class sprayed the garden.
Josh saw a caterpillar.
The caterpillars went away.
The class found a recipe for a spray.

The numeracy section was maths questions about a variety of objects like dice, crayons and planets. Kids had to identify shapes, measure, count, add, subtract and multiply. Here’s one example…

Mona is selling chocolates as a fundraiser for her athletics club. Each chocolate sold raises $2.50 for the club. She sells 40 chocolates. How much money does Mona raise for the athletics club?

There’s also a section on Conventions of Language. Apostrophes, word meaning and adjectives are tested using one line questions or multiple choice answers. Sometimes students had to fill in the correct word. For example…

The creek was full after all the rain that (had/has/was/had been) fallen.

Anyone can have a look at the practice NAPLAN.

I asked my son what he thought about the test.

“It was ok,” he said with a shrug.

And that’s what I settled on in this week of isolation. As I contemplated the tests in life, most of the time just being ok is bloody great.

My family is out of isolation now and back into the world. I hope wherever you are, you’re ok.