My local school will begin the 2011-12 school year next week. While this doesn’t really effect my home school, it does increase my level of stress a little bit. We took an unforeseen break in June and July as far as school was concerned. Family issues required much of my time, and school was the thing that suffered for six weeks. We aren’t behind. Because we home school all year long, we have a cushion built in to our schedule. What I did lose by taking the unforeseen break was the extra time I had built in to help improve my daughter’s ability to take standardized tests. She is an excellent reader, scoring well above grade level, so that is not a problem. Her vocabulary is above level. So why am I concerned? Because is the year my daughter will need to take several standardized tests. We hope to move to a different state by this time next year, and I will have to have scores to present to the new state, even though we plan to continue home schooling.

There are three aspects of standardized tests that concern me with regards to my daughter’s ability to score well. She does not do well with analogies for some reason. She is a very literal thinker. Because of her literal thinking, analogies and metaphors just seem to be hard for her to understand and utilize in her language. Unfortunately, analogies are a staple for standardized tests. The way we are going to approach learning analogies is to simply do lots and lots of practice. That translates to lots of time practicing.

Another aspect of standardized tests that we are going to have to work on is my daughter’s writing ability. Even though I have a degree in English, and I write for a living, I find that I do not teach writing as well as I would like. Part of it is my impatience with my daughter’s unwillingness to actually write. I find it frustrating for her to be able to dictate a great paragraph, but not be able to actually write it herself. As far as standardized tests are concerned, this simply will not work. I actually think my impatience is detrimental to her improving in this area. I’m considering enrolling her in an outside writing course. Perhaps a different teacher will be more successful in teaching my daughter to write.

The last thing we are going to have to face is not really a language arts issue, but an overall issue. She can’t stand to be timed on anything, and any pressure put on her to get her to work within a limited time frame simply paralyzes her. She will not be able to do well on standardized tests, no matter how much knowledge she has in her head, if the test giver starts a set of instructions with, “You will have 30 minutes to complete this section.” I’ve got to figure out a way to help my daughter with this issue. I’m going to be doing some research on this area in the next month or so. Should I come up with a solution or suggestions on this issue, I will certainly pass the information on to those reading here.

I just wanted to add that it would be great if anyone had suggestions to help with these issues, or experience similar problems in their own home schools that they were willing to share through comments. All in all, I have to remember to stay flexible, and work harder when it is necessary, and work smarter when we can.

Are you getting ready for the new school year? It is right around the corner. While we do home school all year long, we still have a certain excitement that happens around the beginning of the traditional school year. We love going to buy school supplies, new pencils, pristine new notebooks, at great prices. Another of the things that helps us rekindle excitement at this time of year, is looking at our curriculum for the new school year. As a general rule, we follow our same core curriculum, Time4Learning. But as my daughter gets older, we have started to add other things to our core curriculum as she develops her own interests and her education advances.

Recently, I had a conversation with a fellow home schooling mom, and she was complaining that they were buying their fourth homeschool language arts program in as many years. Her frustration with changing programs was that different programs taught concepts in different orders. When the first program didn’t work, they tried a different program, but found that there were gaps in some places and too much repetition in other places when compared to the program they had used the year before. Other homeschoolers complained that they used an expensive all-in-one curriculum. The language arts program worked for them, but the math curriculum within the same all-in-one program did not work at all with the child’s learning style.

Part of the reason my family home schools is because my daughter needed to learn different subjects at a different pace, she needed flexibility that one teacher with a classroom of thirty children, could not offer. I hope your planning for the new school year goes well, remember to stay flexible, and enjoy the light you see in your child’s eyes when they really “get” a concept.

I know we are not the only homeschoolers out there that do not test regularly. Fortunately for us, we live in a state that does not require us to submit standardized test scores. This is not to say that we don’t regularly have chapter tests, and quizzes and that sort of thing. We do use that type of testing throughout our school year. Sometimes it is hard to tell if we are truly on level. I use scope and sequence that are attuned to state standards to try to keep us on target as far as level is concerned. I feel fortunate that the curriculum we use, Time4Learning, does a great job of making sure that the information presented is at least grade level.

There are times when I feel like I need to do some spot checking just to reassure myself that we are doing the best home schooling, and learning the right stuff. I have found that checking things like grade level math words, or other grade level vocabulary word lists help. When my daughter makes it through word lists that are grade appropriate, and I ask her to explain, or define the words and she is able to do that with ease, then I am reassured that she learned the concepts and is storing them in long term memory. In reality, it is almost better to spot check for this information at a later time than it is to test right after we finish a chapter. When we have just finished a chapter, the information may just be in her short term memory. When she can remember the work weeks or even months later, I know that she really learned the information. Do you do spot checking like this? Do you depend on the standardized tests to confirm this information? Do you have a different way of spot checking that you would care to share?

It has been a long battle to get my daughter to spell better, and it has been a frustrating one, considering the fact that she is able to read anything she wants to. I worried a lot when we first started home schooling because I pulled her out in the middle of her first grade year. She had such self-esteem issues, and boredom to fight that I went ahead and accelerated her to second grade since we had already covered much of first grade work during the summer between kindergarten and first grade. Spelling was one of the subjects that she was the most unhappy with in first grade and the one that had made the largest hit on her self-esteem. She told me that her teacher thought she was the “stupidest kid on the planet”. I asked her why would she possible think that. Her answer, they gave her a spelling word list on Monday, and then made her practice and repeat it for four whole days, before testing her on Friday. My daughter just doesn’t get practice and repetition to learn something. I asked her what her solution to this problem was. Out of the mouths of babes…her solution was to give her the words and let her look over them, then test her. The words she could spell she didn’t have to practice, because she already knew them. The words she couldn’t spell she would practice only until she could spell them. This actually made sense to me.

Still, she struggles with spelling. She can recognize if a word is spelled incorrectly, but is unable to give the correct spelling. Did I mention that she hates repetition to learn anything?  Because of this, I am constantly looking for new and different ways to improve my daughter’s spelling and vocabulary. Word ladders are one of the ways that she works on vocabulary and spelling. It is actually very rewarding to see how much she enjoys working with word ladders. Word ladders are a good critical thinking exercise as well.

Another type of word manipulation that she is starting to use is Unscramble.  As she gains more confidence in her ability to spell she is willing to try more and different games. Unscramble works for her because she can recognize when a word is spelled correctly, even if she cannot spell the word from scratch. This game gives her the letters in a scrambled order and will give her the hint of saying the word out loud if she asks for it.

I worry that we missed something vital to spelling in the half year of first grade that she didn’t get. If I had to do it all over again, would I accelerate her again? Maybe not, but since I can’t very well have my almost sixth grader going back to first grade work, we will have to come up with new and inventive ways to plug any gaps she might have.

Do you have a reluctant writer? I’m not talking about penmanship here but about actually writing of paragraphs, reports, journals, and things like that. I have a very reluctant writer. My daughter does not like to write anything. She does not like to put pen to paper for any reason. We think that part of her problem may be something related to dysgraphia, where the actual mechanics of writing is painful for her. Her reluctance to write seems to point that direction, as does her terrible handwriting, and the amount of complains I get when I ask her to write. The problem with that line of reasoning is that she draws all of the time. And draws pretty well, so the idea that having a writing implement in her hand and putting it to paper is painful or difficult just doesn’t fit. The thing is that, as a fifth grader, soon to be sixth grader, I need her to write. She should be able to write a five paragraph research paper, basic book reports should be a breeze. Yet, we are still struggling with writing. One of the things that is so frustrating about the problems we are having with writing is that she does very well with her language arts curriculum as a whole. She does not have a problem reading, grammar seems to be easy for her, and she has an impressive vocabulary.

I started narrowing down some of her problem with writing early on. She seems to have a hard time with spelling. The odd thing about this is that she can tell if a word is misspelled if she sees it in print, but twenty minutes later, if I ask her to spell the word that she can recognize as incorrect, she is not able to do it, no matter how many times or ways we review the correct spelling.

I have researched on the internet for ways to help my daughter get a handle on writing. I have spoken to the other mothers in our local home schooling group. Several of them have children who have terrible learning disabilities, and thought that perhaps she has a form of dyslexia. I don’t believe that is the case. Another mom suggested that I have my daughter do mandatory copy work to improve her mechanical writing speed and neatness. It was all I could do not to laugh out loud, apparently she didn’t understand that mandatory, copy work, and my daughter should never grace the same sentence at the same time. The best idea I got from a very computer savvy mom was maybe I should let my daughter start a blog, someplace she could share her thoughts and feelings, and maybe her frustrations. This is an idea I might actually hold on to for a little bit, maybe combine it with the voice recognition software she is in the process of training.

We are trying to finish up fifth grade language arts, which is the main hold up to us going on to sixth grade. I have told her that until she can write at a reasonable level for a fifth grader, she cannot move on. Writing is just too important to let this difficulty with it continue to slow down her forward progress. In this particular conversation, I finally got out of her that she doesn’t mind writing, really, but she hates it that she can’t spell. Many tears and explanations later I came to understand that the fear of spelling words wrong has made her afraid to tackle writing at all.

So, what are we doing now? I had been letting her dictate, but recently I found a speech recognition program imbedded in my computer’s resident software. We got her a headphone with a boon microphone and she has begun the process of training the software. Once she gets the software trained, and she has worked through the tutorials, I believe that she will be able to write on fifth grade level without ever putting pen to paper, thanks to the magic of technology. Sometimes getting a reluctant writer to actually write is just a matter of the right motivation, whether that is letting them start a blog, or use speech recognition software to dictate their paragraphs into. I’m hoping we have found the tool that will help my daughter overcome her writing reluctance, only time will tell. Wish us luck!