Tips & Tricks: Attention Span

I have seen people ask about their child's attention span. Other will get people telling them that they do not do school for long enough, blah, blah, blah. Here is my take on it. You do not need to do school as long as public school does. Do you know why it takes them so long? Because they have 25-36 kids to teach at a time! That will definitely take longer than teaching 1-5+ kids. There is no reason your child needs to sit doing school at home for 8 hours a day when they finish the lesson for the day in half an hour. The attention span is different. Each child will have a different length they are able to actively focus on things. Some children can focus for hours and others only a little bit. This is fine. Your child will build up their attention span a long the way.

Just like how popcorn pops at different times but they are all in the same bag; every child will pop when they are ready. What I do is when I see our daughter is at her limit I stop the lesson. This is especially done during our English class with all the reading, writing and spelling. When she starts to get an attitude after awhile or is messing up a lot on things that I know she knows how to do I know it is time to stop for the day. That being said if we have just started a class or have only been doing the class for like 5 minutes and she has a attitude I do not end the class. That is just typical behavior for a child.

To know when your child is fixing to hit their limit you will need to watch how they are acting. Attention spans can be different for not only each child but for each class as well. Just like if you are listening to something that you find boring you will zone out but if you are listening to something you find interesting you can pay attention the same applies to kids. How do you handle attention spans in your school? Let us know in the comment section below.

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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

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Tips & Tricks: Grading

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