Tips and Tricks: Sick/Missed Days

How to you handle sick days or days you’re to busy to do school? Well here’s what we do. If I am sick we still do school. Plain and simple. I still do housework and care for my family so I feel I can still be teacher. If our daughter is sick we take off until she is better. When she is sick I don’t feel she can focus on the learning. Now onto missed days. Some days you may have a lot to do or you may just want/need to take the day off. I use Saturday and Sunday as contingency days. So we can miss up to 2 days of school a week. I don’t like doing this because I have the year planned out and want to finish everything on time. I know with homeschooling you can finish things whenever but planning the year is what I prefer.

Since I like sticking to the schedule I’ve made with Timberdoodle’s online scheduler we do make up sick/missed days. When the snow storm hit Texas we missed a week of school. So upon returning home I had to figure out how to complete those 5 days of school. We could have used the weekend but instead we did what I call Combo School. What in the world is that? Well it’s doing two days worth of school in one day. Now you would think this would make our school day twice as long but it really only adds maybe 30 minutes more. When I was pregnant with our second baby we missed a lot of school because I was just to weak and sick to even get up. So once I felt a bit better we had a lot of days to catch up on. We did what I call Mega Combo School. This is when we do 3-5 days of school in one day. Yes it is a lot of work. So, if we do this I make sure to move on or stop if it’s too much work or too much of one subject at once. When doing either form of Combo School I add in breaks and lots of games. If you’ve read my blog before you know the majority of our games are educational so there is lots of learning during our break times. What do you guys do? How do you handle sick/missed days?

Comments

Tips & Tricks: Making a Review

I recently posted on social media the reviews that my daughter did. They were for the 1st 6 weeks of our 2nd grade year. I got asked a lot about them. How did I make them? How did your daughter remember all of this? I also got comments that it is too much, public school does not do that, your history is too involved, etc. So let's start off with how I make a review. For math it is very easy I make a list of everything she learned. On the last week of that 6 or 12 week any math she does that is on that list counts towards the review. Anything on the list that is not done during the week I give her a few problems on each. Because I want to make sure that she has understood the concepts I make the problems hard. If they are too easy there is no way for me to know if she really understands or if she can just do easy problems. For history I make questions based off what I have read from the textbook. I pull out the key information. We also do social studies and geography. I make questi

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

OneLuckeyWife

Search This Blog