“Do you give grades in homeschool?”

That innocent question from a new homeschool mom on a message board set off a round of debate. Some said “Yes” because it helps the student get ready for other school situations that do grade.  Others said “no” because grades are not the best way to judge competence. As in most things, both sides could learn a lot by listening to each other.

The School Day This Year

Many things about our school day worked great last year. The biggest thing was the lack of a specific schedule. I used a dry erase board to list the day’s activities, but they could happen at any time. Each day started with my son doing the same morning work: read for 30 minutes, copy the day’s plans into his agenda, watch CNN Student News and write a response to one of the stories.

When my son wanted to, he would have everything done with time to spare before his friends came home. When he was pokey, then he would still be working until bedtime. He learned a lot about time management and the downside of procrastination!

Here’s how the weekly plans look this year:

What’s So Wrong with Common Core?

Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a hot topic in the education world: public, private and homeschool. Basically, CCSS are a list of what students should be able to master by grade and subject. They have been adopted as the standards used by a large majority of states in exchange for those states being eligible for federal funds.

There are questions and problems with CCSS that won’t affect homeschool families, such as getting all children up to speed, transitioning standardized tests for multiple grades, and training teachers. The questions that apply to homeschool families are:

1.       Do these standards encompass what we want our children to learn?
2.       If we don’t following these standards, will our children be at a disadvantage later?

Getting Ready for 8th Grade

Overloaded! That’s how I felt when I started looking at curriculum for 8^th grade. Until I…

• Weeded out anything with an ultra-conservative religious slant
• Took out anything with outdated information
• Removed anything that had to be followed exactly

There was still a ton of options left, but it all still fell into place. I’ll detail the resources we’re using in posts by subject.  My next goal in pre-planning was to map out the timing of each subject for the year. I didn’t want to end up just to WWI in May for history! Naturally, I turned to my personal security blanket – Excel – to create a spreadsheet that would automatically enter start and end dates for each unit by subject.

Wrapping up 7th grade

Looking back on our first year of homeschool, there were ups and downs. Most were expected. What I didn’t expect was how much my son would mature. Some of that could be due to his age. But, I think most of it came from his learning about himself: how he learns, what he likes to learn about, and where that might take him in the future. It made total sense to build on that and homeschool him for 8^th grade.

Starting Science

This was the absolutely easiest subject to get up and running. My son’s 7^th grade class had just finished a unit on weather. So, we were able to jump right into cells. There were several big issues I had with the way he was being taught science in middle school. My older child had also had this particular teacher and had complete lost any interest in science. Fortunately, she had an amazing run of science teachers after that and is now considering a career in biology.

So, what did her great teachers do that the 7^th grade teacher didn’t? Simple. They made science fun and hands-on with minimal bookwork. With that in mind, here was the frame work for future our science lessons:

Starting English

My son struggles with even the most basic writing task. I don’t mean he whines about doing it or procrastinates until the last minute. We’re talking a full blown shutdown. He would start with the best intentions, but quickly become stuck and unable to put together even a simple sentence.

The first month of home school, we focused simply on his writing fluency. Writing fluency is all about his being able to easily form thoughts into complete sentences and put them down in written form. I used the suggestions from Reviving Disengaged Writers, by Christopher Lehman, to help him start getting something on paper. He could write on any topic as long as he produced ten typed lines a day. The first day, he generated a list of ideas for future use, but all the entries that month were about Mind Craft. And that’s O.K.

By the end of the first four weeks, he was able to easily write ten (or more!) lines on any topic of his choosing. We were not worried at this point about paragraph structures, editing, word choice or any other mechanics. It was all about getting the ideas from his head to the paper. Anything more will come later this year.

Starting Math

Math is not my kids’ favorite subject. That would be science. But, math is by far the easiest one for them. Since I’m a former public school math teacher and my son never seriously struggled with math, my first instinct was to skip all pre-made workbooks and create my own. Then, I started thinking about all the work involved in making up problems, so I punted and headed to the local curriculum store for workbooks. I’m still designing what is taught when and how, but the pre-made worksheets are a huge time saver.

Eventually, my son will return to public school. To make that transition easier on the academic side, I am trying to include all the objectives required for his grade.  The store had one set of workbooks that were specifically tied to the new common core standards for math. Since we’re compacting 7th and 8th grade together, I bought the sets for both years. They came with separate teacher’s and student’s books. An old fashion Pre-algebra workbook completed the math library.

Starting Social Studies

Social studies was the subject I dreaded tackling the most. And, of course, it ended up being the easiest to plan and the most enjoyable for both of us on a daily basis.

The objectives for social studies were really hard for me to understand in the beginning. But, I think I finally figured them out. There are time periods we need to study that are called eras (World History Era Standards). The objectives need to be applied to each era separately whenever possible.

Step 2 Content, con’t.

At this point, I had read through the entire published objectives for 7th graders in North Carolina. I had them sorted into charts with the notes from the unpacked PDFs, which gave me a general picture of what we should be teaching in order to stay on pace with public school. I had also looked over the objectives for the next few grades to see where we needed to be at the end.

Step 2 Content

There are two main questions to answer when designing a curriculum: what are you going to teach and how are you going to present it? I’ll refer to the “what” as content.

We live in North Carolina. Their required content is described by grade and subject here. They are using the Common Core Standards for English and mathematics.  These tell you what should be taught in each grade level. Colleges will expect this as a minimum of what students should know.

Step 1 for Curriculum Planning

The first step I took when planning the curriculum was to write down our overall goals. This helped focus how the material would be taught. My son has two main issues that were holding him back. First, he has Disorder of Written Expression. That is a learning disability which means he struggles with putting his thoughts into words and then writing them down. His other big problem is anything to do with organization. Here are the four goals that have guided our year:

What to teach?

When I was looking for middle school curriculum for home school, I felt like Goldilocks. This book is too easy, this book is too hard. Not much on the market for middle school.