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• Took out anything with outdated information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.

Our Summer Vacation: Science rules!

In our house, science is the thing that rules us all and in the darkness binds us… together, that is. We spent the summer binge watching Eureka and Warehouse 13. Besides renaming our homeschool to “Tesla High”, my son was motivated to do a lot of science experiments just for fun. My only requirement was that he needed to write a short paragraph about each experiment in his science journal. He had come so far in his writing struggles, it was the perfect way to not loose any ground.

Here was one of his favorites. He used the gas generated from dry ice in warm water to create strong soap bubbles. Thank you to Steve Spangler for this lab. (Bouncing Smoke Bubbles from this book)  

  

This summer’s just-for-fun lab time was a big hit so we’re continuing it each Friday this school year. And, I am thrilled that my son finally loves exploring science again.

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.