What Do You Wish You'd Done Differently?

[Gil]

If your AL is 12+, looking back with hindsight--what do you wish you'd done differently during their mid-elementary years?

 

[lewelma]

With my older, I have focused on the passion for learning and on hard work.  He has excellent daily time management and reasonably good paper management.  But now as a 14 year old, he is refusing to keep a calendar.  It is not that he has a lot of dates, but there are some: his mock exams in physics and math; his real exams in physics, math, and music; his trio and string group performances; his orthodontist appointment, etc.  He told me that seeing the dates on a calendar will stress him out.  He does not want to know when things are, he just wants to work hard and study to the best of his ability.  But now I need to convince him that he needs a larger time frame to keep track of.  Should have done that earlier!

 

The other thing I should have done is taught him how to make study materials.  I think to get him to see the need for this, I needed to give him tests.  The problem is that he does not view *my* tests as worthy of study because the grades don't count.  It might be different for Americans with the transcript, IDK, but here in NZ we have an exam based university entrance, so his first real exam is one that counts and I am finding that he does not really know how to study effectively.  It is one thing to develop a skill, like mathematical problem solving that is hard fought and long lasting, it is another thing to memorize what you need to know for a test that then requires you to synthesize the information to answer deep questions.  He has no technique to actually study.

 

Because he has always been such a hard worker, I have failed to notice these little (but not so little) things that I should have gotten sorted when he was in middle school.  Not sure I needed to get them done in elementary school, though.  But I can't think of anything back then that I got wrong. :thumbup1:

 

Ruth in NZ

[Luckymama]

I wish I would have started sooner than fourth grade, but life didn't allow (my mother was ill and then died).

 

I wish I would have let her take off in math during fifth grade (I was uncomfortable about gaps), but she's made up for it :lol:

 

lewelma, I forced a calendar on dd at 12 and 13. She rebelled last year at 14 and only wanted to know a week in advance, though she managed to plan long term for her two outsourced classes. So I gave up.

 

But now at 15, it's like a switch has been flipped! She returned home from the Arabic immersion camp (four week, for credit), bought a planner and a monthly calendar whiteboard, designed a weekly schedule (color coded!), and communicated with her new Arabic prof at the university without freaking out. I don't know if it was the prospect of beginning "real" classes at the university or if it was being surrounded by an incredibly ambitious, slightly older cohort at camp, but I'll take it :D

 

Of course, she still hasn't written the paper due on Monday, the first day of English class...

[quark]

You didn't say it had to be academic. :D

 

We have had academic challenges and time management issues but really, I see these improving with age and putting him in situations where he sees the need to change habits. Now that I know this I don't regret decisions made or wish I had done it differently. But I really do wish that I had been a lot more aggressive about pulling him out of the house and getting him involved in other pursuits e.g. physical fitness, community involvement etc. His mind is just too wrapped up with study or TV/books and I feel that I contributed to that by being a book-head just like him. Budget and location were a big consideration for us and still are to some extent but I think if I had really planned it well, we could have achieved this.

[Chrysalis Academy]

With my older, I have focused on the passion for learning and on hard work.  He has excellent daily time management and reasonably good paper management.  But now as a 14 year old, he is refusing to keep a calendar.  It is not that he has a lot of dates, but there are some: his mock exams in physics and math; his real exams in physics, math, and music; his trio and string group performances; his orthodontist appointment, etc.  He told me that seeing the dates on a calendar will stress him out.  He does not want to know when things are, he just wants to work hard and study to the best of his ability.  But now I need to convince him that he needs a larger time frame to keep track of.  Should have done that earlier!

 

The other thing I should have done is taught him how to make study materials.  I think to get him to see the need for this, I needed to give him tests.  The problem is that he does not view *my* tests as worthy of study because the grades don't count.  It might be different for Americans with the transcript, IDK, but here in NZ we have an exam based university entrance, so his first real exam is one that counts and I am finding that he does not really know how to study effectively.  It is one thing to develop a skill, like mathematical problem solving that is hard fought and long lasting, it is another thing to memorize what you need to know for a test that then requires you to synthesize the information to answer deep questions.  He has no technique to actually study.

 

Because he has always been such a hard worker, I have failed to notice these little (but not so little) things that I should have gotten sorted when he was in middle school.  Not sure I needed to get them done in elementary school, though.  But I can't think of anything back then that I got wrong. :thumbup1:

 

Ruth in NZ

 

Love this post. I'm insisting that dd start to use a planner this year. Last year I bought one that went untouched, and I gave her a daily to-do list. This year I'm giving her a weekly to-do list, and she has one online class with deadlines, so I'm really pushing the planner. My goal is to get her managing her own time effectively before starting DE at 14. I've got a little over a year.

 

The bolded is something I'm running into now - I'm teaching dd to take notes from lectures. She hasn't said it out loud yet, but I can hear her thinking - ok, I get you need to do this in college classes where there is a test, but why do I have to do it now?  Obvious answer is to learn how to do it before you get into a testing situation, but I am thinking of writing tests just to make it feel more relevant. Although as you say, if grades don't *really* count, will this be effective?  I guess she needs to learn to do tests, anyway, before DE, so it's worth it for that reason . . . 

[SanDiegoMom]

 

The bolded is something I'm running into now - I'm teaching dd to take notes from lectures. She hasn't said it out loud yet, but I can hear her thinking - ok, I get you need to do this in college classes where there is a test, but why do I have to do it now? Obvious answer is to learn how to do it before you get into a testing situation, but I am thinking of writing tests just to make it feel more relevant. Although as you say, if grades don't *really* count, will this be effective? I guess she needs to learn to do tests, anyway, before DE, so it's worth it for that reason . . .

 

This is definitely a good idea. My oldest was taught Cornell Notes in sixth grade and was taking notes from teachers' lectures by ninth. And then we moved from an extremely rigorous school to a "good" school and she hadn't been required to take notes yet. Instead she's had skeleton notes or the teacher has lectured and then passed out a copy of the notes. She does make awesome study guides from the textbooks, but her best teachers didn't use textbooks- they only lectured.

[regentrude]

I wish I would have started homeschooling right after 4th grade and would not have subjected my kids to any time in the middle school (I did not pull them out until 6th and 5th grades, respectively, when things got too bad; homeschooling simply had not been on my radar since i did not know anybody who did this). If I had to do it over again, I would still send them to public elementary K-4; we are first generation immigrants who speak a different language in the home, and elementary school was important for their development of English proficiency.

 

I wish that I would have been better at dealing with sibling differences. I tried very hard not to compare, but apparently I have not been good enough at that, so that DS felt overshadowed by his extremely ambitious, high performing sister.

 

Other than that, I can't think of anything I should have changed for DD; the outcome of our homeschooling was absolutely great. With DS, the jury is still out.

[Guest ladycropper]

regentrude, I think you did the best you could at the time... me too... at least you got them out and homeschooling.  Im new too and my kids are 6th dyslexia and 8th grades.  Idk what to do either, ive been reading over curriculum for weeks.  But Im sure whatever your family decides will be awesome.  I think of all the times my kids had to deal with other students issues and how they couldn't learn with some of the other issues going on in the classroom.  Surely I can do alittle better or not worse...

[Junie]

I'm not sure that my dc would be called "advanced learners", but:

 

I wish I had spent more time on handwriting for my ds who needed it.  His handwriting did not improve on its own like I thought it would.

 

I wish I had started a science curriculum sooner.  (We unschooled science through 8th grade for my older dc.  We will unschool science through 3rd grade for younger dc.)

 

I wish that I had written out my high school "course catalog" -- the subjects that I plan to teach -- before ds was in 9th grade.  I would have started when he was in 6th or 7th if I had thought of it.  I do have a course catalog now, so the dc who are coming up will know what subjects (especially electives) are available.  And if there's something they want to learn that isn't currently in the catalog, I will have time to research and create the course for them.