About PracticeMarks
What PracticeMarks is
Short, standards-aligned practice for kids in grades 3, 4, and 5 — Reading and Math at every grade, plus Science at grade 5. A parent makes an account, adds up to three kids, and each kid gets their own login. Practice runs year-round rather than in a panic each spring, and a parent can point it at whatever their kid is actually working on this week.
A short warm-up finds the starting point — there is no score at the end of it. That becomes a plan: one thing to work on now, and something else to do instead if today is not the day for the first thing. The plan updates as they practice, and finished topics drop off it.
A kid is never shown a score, a percentage, or a grade level. That is deliberate, and it is the rule most of the design decisions here come from. Parent readouts name skills, not years. The reward is a poster the kid designs and gradually uncovers as they answer — not a streak, not XP, not a badge that punishes them for missing a day.
It works on paper too. Worksheets print, the kid writes on them, and a parent photographs the finished sheet to have it read back into the plan — so practice does not have to mean more screen time.
North Carolina is the state that is live today. The rest of the country is a waitlist: the structure is built, but no other state’s standards and question bank are.
What is the NC EOG?
The North Carolina End-of-Grade tests (NC EOGs) are the standardized assessments administered each spring by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI). Every public-school student in grades 3, 4, and 5 takes Reading and Math EOGs; fifth graders also take a Science EOG. The results are used for student promotion decisions, school accountability, and parent communication about grade-level progress.
EOGs are aligned to the North Carolina Standard Course of Study — the state’s grade-by-grade learning standards. Each test item targets a specific standard code (for example, 5.NBT.3 in fifth-grade math). NCDPI publishes released test forms each year that show the style, difficulty, and standard coverage of the real exam. PracticeMarks is not affiliated with NCDPI; it is an independent prep tool built around publicly available standards and released items.
Why I built PracticeMarks
Hi, I’m Eric. I’m a professor and researcher by day. Mostly, though, I’m a dad who wanted to help his own kid feel ready — and I was disappointed by the other apps I tried. So I built this. My fifth grader is still the person it gets tested on first.
It started as EOG prep and grew past it. The test turned out to be a useful thing to calibrate against and a bad thing to organise a kid’s year around, so what it is now is ordinary practice that happens to be honest about which standard every question came from.
There is no free trial, no advertising to your kid, and nothing sold to anybody. It is one person’s software, so it is small on purpose.
Give it a try. It’s not perfect — there can be mistakes. Use it with discretion, and please tell me what you find. Feedback is very welcome.
Reach me at support@practicemarks.com.
PracticeMarks is a product of Green Buoy. Charges on your statement appear as GREEN BUOY.