Skip to main content

Tips & Tricks: Not Ready

Our oldest daughter has always been very advanced so she is a whole grade ahead of kids her age. This is great and I love that she has a passion for learning. Not all kids will be this way. Not all kids will be ready for everything at the same time as their friends or even their own family members. You will need to decided if your child needs extra work for things or if they simple are not ready. You do not want to push a child or force them to do something they are not ready for. If you child absolutely does not like writing and it is a struggle everyday to get them to write even something simple them write it for them. It will get you through the day without a fight. They will eventually learn the skills just in their own time. Our daughter read her first book before she was 3 but I did not read until I was 9 and I went to public school. So delays do not mean your child would be better off in public school or that you are not a suitable teacher for them.

Some signs that your kiddo may not be ready:
  • they fight doing the work however this can also because they do not like the subject
  • they really just do not understand what they need to do
  • they might fake being sick or say they can not do the work
  • they have not mastered the material needed for the new thing they are learning
    • example: have not mastered the alphabet then do not push reading yet instead focus on letters and their sounds
  • they just want you to do all the work
  • they are taking a long time to finish the work

Some things that can help you are going slower on the lessons. You do not need to finish things in a certain time so do not rush. Show your child a few examples and do not take shortcuts. For things like math when it is a new concept I do one for our daughter to show her how it is done and then see if she can do it herself. I do show her tricks that I have learned along the way to make it easier as well. If you know tricks to certain things then teach them to your child it may help them tremendously. For reading if they are starting out learning to blend sounds but do not quite say the sounds fast enough to hear the blend then say them for your child. If they do not like writing yet do ahead and do it for them as long as they are still young. For history/social studies and science try different things if your curriculum is mostly reading add in visuals and experiments to make it hands on and explain the facts behind it along the way. If you have ways to make things easier when your child is not ready then let us know in the comments!


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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