Tips & Tricks: Taking Test

I know a lot of people wonder how do you deal with testing when you homeschool? First off you need to look into your state laws on homeschooling. In our state you do not need to do any testing. This includes all standardized test like the STARR test. So how do I make sure that our children are retaining the information taught.

Some homeschoolers do not test. Test only show what the student knows about that subject not their overall intelligence. However, I do give test. I bought the history, math and science test booklet that goes with our textbooks. I make sure to write down each main point of the lessons we do and we do a 6 week as well as a 12 week review.

Every 12th week of school I use that as the review. The math work we do goes over everything from the previous 12 weeks so our daughter completes both the math work for that week as well as showing me that we knows how to do the problems from the previous lessons. Two birds one stone kind of thing.

When I do give test from the test booklets I don’t tell our daughter that she is taking a test. I don’t want her to be self conscious or worry that she’ll get a bad grade. Instead, I tell her after we complete school for the day that she actually took test and she’s always so surprised because she said she had fun. That is what I strive for when we do school and when making sure she has retained the information given. I don’t think children are learning at their best if they are frustrated, scared or worried. School and learning should be fun!

All pictures shown are from our Timberdoodle curriculum. Even the “tent” she made while being a nomad was from The Story of The World. I highly recommend Timberdoodle. We’ve used them for 3 now and will continue to use them because they make awesome choices for homeschool curriculum.

Comments

Review: Geoboards

A fun way to help kids get great hand-eye coordination isn’t with Geoboards . I love that with these there are 4 boards included so you can use it with multiple students. The rubber bands are different colors and 2 different sizes. The pictures are fun, colorful and you get a bunch of them. My daughter really likes these. For some reason she thinks it’s so funny when the bands pop her. At first I just let her place the bands anywhere to get the idea of how to put them on. Then we started places them just on the white lines in the picture. She always wants to do more than one so I let her do as many pictures as she wants. I do wish there was a blanket picture so she could design her own things.

Tips & Tricks: Grading

When grading first thing you need to do is check your state laws on homeschool. Some states require you to keep record of your curriculum and and grading while some don’t. I do not have to keep any records or grading. Since I use Timberdoodle they have an awesome online scheduler that I use. It has all the curriculum that we use and in the check boxes I put the grades. At the end of each year I keep the scheduler pages so I have records. Below is how I grade things. I also do not show our daughter the grades or tell her them. I don’t want her to worry about getting a bad grade. When she’s in middle school and high school grades that’s when I’ll start letting her know about grade. My grading system: Pre-K - 2 Grade: she will not see the grade E: excellent; no extra work needed; 100-90% S: satisfactory; give a little extra work; 89-80% N: needs improvement; give a lot of extra work; 79-0% 3 - 5 Grade: she will only see letter grade if she wants to know her grade A: 100-90%

Tips & Tricks: Class Schedule

How do you make a class schedule? When do you do which subjects? How long do you do a class? Does each day look the same? It is easy to make a homeschool schedule since you can school however you like. Since we use Timberdoodle we have access to their online schedule which over the years has been updated to be an outstanding way to schedule our subjects. If you do not use Timberdoodle I would suggest using Excel. If you know a website that allows you to create a schedule (for free) then let me know in the comments. The first thing I do make our schedule is make a list of all of our items and mark which ones I think will be challenging and which will be easy. Core subjects would be harder than things like STEM and thinking skills. Then I use that list to make another list on what day we will do each item. Making sure that not one day will be to hard or to easy. I like it to be pretty even as well as each day having about the same number of items. Some subjects we do everyday those are E

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