Tips & Tricks: Extending a Year

Last year we did 1st grade. This year I have decided to extend our 1st grade year. My main and only reason for this is because I would like our daughter to get a little better at reading before we move onto 2nd grade. Academically she is still ahead for her age. She will be half a year ahead of where she would be if she was in public school. I may move onto 2nd grade before the year is up but we will see. There maybe many reasons to extend a school year. Your child may need a little extra help, they may not have retained the information, you could have had a difficult year (moving, a new addition to the family, etc). There is no shame in continuing a school year. If you do not want to redo a whole school year you can move on in certain subjects and stay with the same grade level in other classes. The great thing about homeschooling is that you can decide what is the best option for your children.

Since this year we will be continuing with 1st grade I have decided to add in some extra reading things. Our English class will be longer than what we had been doing. Our daughter started reading very early; a month before turning 3. Yet there are still come sight words that she has to sound out and blending sounds can be a challenge sometimes. My hopes are that this year she can really progress and get a better foundation for reading. As many know we use All About Reading. What is great about this curriculum is that it focuses on decoding a word versus memorizing. So when she gets to a reading longer words she will have the ability to sound them out properly.

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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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