Social Studies: State by State

America is a wonderful patchwork quilt of states, each with unique features. We’re working our way through all the states in the order they were granted statehood, learning about their geography, industry and current political make-up. Between the books in our library and the internet, my son will create a page of information on each state and draw a map of the prominent features. Here are the books we’re using, with a sample page for each:

“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:

School Skills – Math Fluency

Just like fluency in reading, fluency in math refers to how accurately and quickly you can work. I spent the first week of home school assessing my son for potential problems. We’d been told that he was weak in math fluency, but it didn’t make sense, because he could work complicated problems just fine in a reasonable amount of time.

School Skills – Learning Styles

You’ve probably heard about learning styles. Your learning styles describe the ways that you best learn new information. It could be you learn best by seeing something or hearing. Some people learn best when there’s a physical activity attached.

In the beginning, as the curriculum was coming together, my son and I had to figure out what his real learning styles were and how to take advantage of those. I didn’t limit it to just the standard styles you can find on websites across the net. Instead, I focused on what really worked to get him interested in new stuff. Then I looked at what worked to help him understand, remember and use all that knowledge.

School Skills – Summarizing

 My son is kind of, moderately, somewhere on the autism spectrum. Since he can function somewhat normally, most people see him as just being a little “different”.  He doesn’t display the symptoms frequently enough to get the label of autism or aspergers, but he does share many of the common traits with others with those diagnoses. We say he has just enough autism to be a great engineer. He is incredibly smart, but is very literal and linear in his thinking. He has limited social skills. Just like all the engineers he’s related to!

Anyway, as a result of his very literal thinking and amazing power of memorization, he’s never learned how to summarize.