Tips & Tricks: Multiple Grades (Younger Kids)

Teaching multiple grades at one time can be quite tricky. Especially if the children are younger like mine are right now. One gets jealous of the other very quickly if I need to take time for the other to help with individually. Since our youngest is just starting out with her schooling it is a lot of one-on-one time for her as she needs help with everything and I have to explain everything to her. As a result is that the oldest always gets jealous even though she knows that her sister needs help where as she can do more things on own. So, how can you combat this from happen? Well no matter what it is gonna happen I have come to realize. Here are some things that I do.

I do not alter the way I teach the youngest. She still gets to sit on my lap and I use all the same items that I did with our oldest.
I make sure to take all the time I need to with our youngest so that she gets the time she needs and is learning what she needs to at this age.
For our oldest when she needs help I make sure to stop and answer her questions as she has them. I can tell however if she is just making things up our of jealously and I let her know when she is acting this way.
We do some classes just me and her so that she gets the individual attention that she needs; like with English.
I do not combine their classes. Some people choose to combine history and science for all of their kids but I will not be doing this. I will do these classes separately since they are indifferent grades and what the oldest does will be to advanced for the youngest. They both can participate in the science experiments though.

What kinds of issues do you run into when teaching multiple grades at once? Let us know in the comments below. If you have experience with this what are some tips and tricks you have?

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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