Tips & Tricks: Extra Help with a Class

What should you do if your child is not understanding a certain subject or concept in a class? There are many things you can do. Often times the curriculum you choose will have extra work on their website that you can print out or copy by hand and have your student complete. This will allow them to get extra practice in. You would spend more time on in the areas that they do not understand. For instance if my daughter says she that she does not understand what I am talking about when we go over her history class then I reword it for her or explain further what the textbook is trying to say. When she did not understand what I meant in science that atoms join together to make a molecule we physically reacted it with her, my husband and I all being an atom and then we linked arms and feet literally becoming the molecule. Another thing that you can do is hire a tutor. Sometimes having someone else explain the same concept that you are trying to helps the child understand it better. When I was in high school I often tutored for chemistry and math; both regular and AP classes. Getting extra help does not have to be expensive either there are lots of free resources online that you can use. You can probably find a video on YouTube to help explain things but I do caution that you watch the videos before your child incase there is anything that they do not need to hear not all videos will be kid appropriate. You can get library books to help explain things or add in another curriculum. Getting a math booklet that has only the same problems that your child has trouble with can help them get extra practice without switching to other kids of problems that they already know how to do or ones they have not learned how to solve yet. What are things that you have done to help your child with things they do not understand? Put your tips in the comment section below.

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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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