SkateLeft
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Posts posted by SkateLeft
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I use it for everything. With my older kids, I used OneNote, then switched to Trello for the boys, but last year I jumped to Google Classroom. It's a perfect fit for my youngest, especially. He has special needs (he doesn't have a learning disability), and uses Google docs for the majority of his written work. I already create his written assignments in docs or on Google Slides and we collaborate through Drive, so using Google Classroom was a pretty natural transition.
For my older son, who only has a few courses at home with me, I have each course in a different classroom. I put the syllabus in the about section for each class, along with links to related websites we'll use all semester. Then each course has topics labeled Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, etc. I transfer the weekly assignments from my syllabus to a Google Slides template and post it as an assignment with the correct week as the topic with Friday as the due date. I use the "schedule" feature to set up future weeks. For his stuff, I plan in 18 week semesters.
For my younger son, I just have one class for everything. He also has assignments listed by weekly topics, and a topic for daily work. The about section has links to documents with course related passwords, and curriculum course sites and his reading log (created in Google forms, so the results go straight into a Google sheet).
I hope this makes sense. It was super fast and easy to set up, and it works really well for us! I'm a huge nerd. :D
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My oldest started taking high school classes on campus through a local university program at 10. She started full-time at the community college at 14. She went off to an out of state university at 16.
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Now that fall is coming, and we're not on the boat full-time as of last week, I'm back to planning. My youngest is a rising 6th grader. He has some special needs that pose challenges, but he's a bright little guy with no learning disabilities. We use Google Classroom to manage his work, and he does as much written work as possible through Google docs.
Math:
Excel Math
Aleks Quicktables
Science:
GamED Mindbytes
Novare Physical Science
History:
Shmoop 6th grade World History
Writing and Grammar:
Cover Story
Daily handwriting practice
Literature:
My own syllabus (still working on this)
Other:
Art and PE at co-op, weekly therapies, Boy Scouts
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My older three kids are July, June and August birthdays, respectively. #3 has a birthday 2 weeks before our state cutoff date.
As a homeschooler, I didn't worry about it. I used their grades by age for anything (like scouts) that required a grade. Otherwise, I just figured I'd delay starting high school by a year if they weren't ready.
I'm very glad I didn't redshirt #1, because she started full-time college classes at 14, and went off to university at 16. I have no idea what I'd have done with her if I had to keep her home longer.
#2 stayed right on target, and went off to college at 18.
#3 was a delayed reader. All along, I really thought I'd probably redshirt him for high school, but during his middle school years he took off academically. He ended up being very ready for high school, and now he's a rising 11th grader. He'll be 16 next month, and my most avid reader.
So the short version is... you don't need to worry about redshirting for kindergarten as a homeschooler. Just do whatever your child is ready to do, when they're ready to do it. Don't worry about assigning them a grade level until you need to.
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I've done this for years. I just did it with my youngest last week at the coffee shop. I'm very informal about it. I have my laptop open with a google doc where I have notes on possible options for the fall.
I don't have a prepared set of questions or anything. II just ask what they thought of this last school year, which stuff they liked and didn't like and what kinds of things they might want to do in the coming year. This is also when I run possible curricula by them. I just choose some things myself, but I also have options for other things. My youngest expressed a preference for doing BYL 8 (History of Science) over Bookshark 6 or MBtP 10-12, told me he wants to read Frankenstein (no idea why), and picked which physical science resource to use (Conceptual Academy).
Kids #1 and #3 got really into the discussion and loved providing feedback. They could spend hours talking about school and their goals and which approaches they felt suited them best. #2 and #4 just wanted to get it over with. "Yes, everything is fine. I didn't like that stupid math textbook. Why? Because math is boring. Yeah, that looks good. No, there's nothing else I want to learn." :D
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I started doing "kindergarten" with my kids at 4 or 5, but didn't include them on my Letter of Intent to the district until they were compulsory age.
You can begin whenever you want, but don't bother reporting them until necessary.
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My son is dual enrolling at the CC, but doesn't want to go full time like his sisters did.
Here are his fall plans:
Calc I via dual enrollment
College Writing 1 via dual enrollment
Interpersonal Communication via dual enrollment
US History (at home with me, using Tindall's America: A Narrative History, primary sources and my syllabus)
American Literature (at home with me, using my syllabus)
Physics (at home with me, haven't decided what we'll use)
His ECs are Boy Scouts, scuba diving, sailing, and book club.
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I'm right there with you. I don't need anything new at this point. We spend most of the non-winter months on our sailboat now that the girls are out of the house, so we tend to stick with stuff we can use on the Kindle, tablets and laptops. Space for physical materials is at a premium, so I have to be very selective.
Not only do I not want to buy anything new, I'm trying to get rid of what we've accumulated over the years!
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My son used the Big History course in 9th grade, and it shows on his transcript as "Big History Project World History." I based my course on one of the syllabi in the BHP Dropbox that was designed to make a year long CA a-g approved world history course.
I added in quite a bit of additional reading (Maps of Time, This Fleeting World and Guns, Germs and Steel were particular favorites for my son), along with the Big History lectures from the Great Courses. As Catholics, we also used some of the resources from the Magis Center. He thoroughly enjoyed the course. We'll do another semester long course in modern world history at some point, because we didn't get to spend quite enough time in units 8 and 9. If I could do it over, I'd probably plan out the year to spend a couple more weeks there, and a little less time in units 1 - 4.
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I'd have to do the audiobook. There's no way I could read that dialect.
Actually, all of my kids have hated Tom Sawyer, mainly because the dialect and regional word choices are pretty painful for them. My oldest at least appreciated the story, but #3 cites it as the only book he really hates. He loved the Scarlet Letter, oddly enough, but wanted to throw Tom Sawyer out the window. :laugh:
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My younger daughter did that same thing. She set her sights on ONE school and said, "That's where I'm going." She applied as soon as the application period opened, and was admitted in August of her senior year, before we'd even started her senior classes. I spent half of her senior year trying to talk her into at least looking at other schools. I wanted her to apply to a handful of others, just so she'd have a choice. She said nope, and that one school was where she ended up.
She loves it there, got a full-time job in town for the summer, sublet an apartment and didn't come home. I don't expect her to ever move back. Her junior year first choice has stayed her first choice!
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#1 was reading very well by 4.
#2 and #4 both started kindergarten with me as non-readers at 5 and took off by the end of the year.
#3 didn't read until he was 10. He's now my most avid reader. He always has his kindle in his pocket and spends all of his extra money on books.
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The transcript is separate from the course description document. A transcript should be a single page (some people use two pages, but I prefer one) that includes course titles and grades. Volunteer work did not go on our transcript. Instead, it was listed on the applications under extra-curricular activities.
Course descriptions are not required by all universities, but it's good to keep them in case your student does end up needing them. A course description document will include the description and materials used. I did not list "programs," but only core materials used. I wrote descriptions for the courses I created and copied course descriptions for all dual enrollment college courses. I did include course descriptions for PE, Art and Music because there are MANY different ways to create those courses. My younger child's music credits included classical voice studies, while my oldest has fine art credits in art history, drawing and painting. Oldest did sailboat racing for PE, while #2 was my short track speedskater. I did not award grades in PE, but only graded it as pass/fail.
Interestingly, none of the universities that my older two kids applied to required course descriptions. We submitted their high school transcript, their dual enrollment college transcript, ACT scores and their applications.
As far as how important volunteer work is, that depends on whether or not your son has other extra curriculars. It also depends on how selective his prospective colleges are. If he's applying to a state university with open enrollment, then volunteer work doesn't matter much at all. If he's applying to a highly selective university that expects extensive extra curriculars from their prospectives, then having volunteer work might be helpful. If he's got a list of other things though, again, it might not matter.
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I left because I got tired of the constant one-upping (an issue with so many GT communities) and posts by folks with very young children asking the same questions over and over. I just wasn't getting anything out of it anymore.
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My kids all used Singapore Math, either the Primary edition (oldest, though she also used Houghton Mifflin's Math Steps for a while) or the Standards edition (#2 and #3). All three were well prepared for high school math and beyond.
If Singapore is working for you, I don't think there's any reason to switch.
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For me, high school became junior college when universities started tacking on more and more general education requirements on top of 4 years of high school. It's a waste of time and money for good students, and keeps them from exploring the fields they might really be interested in.
I took some community college classes during my senior year of high school in 1990 in Silicon Valley, including English 1A and 1B, which ended up being invaluable because they were prerequisites to so many other classes once I got to the university. So dual enrollment isn't a new thing. I think it was pretty limited to folks who knew how to work the system or lived in the right areas. Now it's just more widely available. That's a good thing.
I *hated* general education classes at the UC. I felt like I had to spend another two years wasting time before I could actually get to the classes in my major or even just classes in other subjects that I was interested in taking. Also, many GE classes were so impacted that it was sometimes hard to get into the GE classes I needed. It took me just over 5 years to graduate as a result.
Doing full-time dual enrollment in 11th and 12th grade let my older kids complete their general education requirements so that when they went off to university they were able to study what they wanted to study. That enabled my oldest to pursue dual degrees in two quite different fields, and let my younger dd explore some of the different engineering fields she was interested in before deciding.
With that said #3 will not be doing full-time dual enrollment, because he doesn't want to. He's going to take Calc 1 and College Writing 1 at the college in the fall, but the rest of his coursework will be at home with me.
Dual enrollment is not for everyone, definitely. I'm very glad it's an option though.
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My oldest started taking university and high school classes at 10, through our local state university talent search program. She dual enrolled full time at 14 and I graduated her from high school at 16. She had 60 semester units of college course work completed and a 4.0 college GPA. She headed off to university at 16. I'm glad I was able to keep her home that long.
Do you live in a state where you need to report a grade level to anyone as a homeschooler? I didn't really think about whether or not she was in "middle school" at any point. I just did what she needed. If I think about it, she probably did do middle school level work. She just did it earlier.
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My kids age differences are pretty much the same as yours, only I'm ten years further down the road. I don't know. The youngers' time will come. I used to feel that my youngers were getting the bum end of school, but as the older kids became more independent, graduated and moved out, the younger ones started getting a lot more focused time. Next year, #3 will be dual enrolled full-time at the community college, so my little guy will be the only one I'll be teaching.
The sad thing is that I really miss having more kids in our homeschool now, because there are projects and things that were more fun with more kids around.
Also sort of related, my oldest was home briefly this week, and she commented that she can can work anywhere with any amount of distraction because she always had to share time with younger siblings, while she noticed that my youngest insists on everything being totally quiet when he does school. He's not used to working amidst noise and distraction.
On the other hand, my youngers have benefited from my increased experience and confidence. I don't stress about the small stuff in our homeschool as much anymore. My older two were definitely my guinea pigs, so there are advantages to being the younger ones!
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#1 used Houghton Mifflin Math Steps and Singapore Primary Math. #2 used Singapore Primary Math. #3 used Singapore Math Standards Edition.
All three of them went on to higher levels of math with no issues, and my older two are STEM majors, so no regrets at all.
#4 uses Calvert Math. He still has few more years with it, but it works for him, so no regrets.
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I never used a timed schedule. I tried, but it always created more problems for us than it solved. Sometimes, my kids wanted more time to do something or moved through something faster than I predicted. Sometimes appointments would interfere or we'd want to go off on a rabbit trail.
We just had very predictable routines. After breakfast, I'd tell all the kids to go get their math. That's how we always started, until high school when they learned to get themselves up and going.
My youngest has severe special needs. I have picture magnet schedule for each day set up on a white board, but we don't worry about times. I tell him to get started on Quicktables (he uses Aleks Quicktables for fact practice). Then he watches CNN Student News while I pull out his math.
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Like Attolia, I have ten years between the youngest and oldest. However, I know I'm slacking. :D
It's a challenge. My older two are away at college and won't be home this summer at all. Number 3 was just accepted into the dual enrollment program full-time at the CC next year. I'm down to working with my youngest, and he has some severe special needs, which makes it even harder to motivate to keep going. I bought 5th grade Calvert for him to use this year, just to make sure that I'm not letting things slide too much. I still tweak it a bit, but it's nice for both of us to have the structure.
I know it's just a different season of life, but it's tough.
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My younger daughter took geometry as a summer school course through K12's International Academy. It was pretty expensive, but it worked well for her.
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I've also been homeschooling for a very long time, and was able to infer what the OP meant by "boxed curriculum." ;)
When I've used pre-planned stuff, I don't use another planner for extras. I try to simplify things as much as possible, so I'll generally just make notes in the margin. The times in my life that I've turned to a pre-planned program have usually been times when I've been dealing with real life issues, and juggling another planner would probably have defeated the whole purpose.
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Both of my girls did full-time dual enrollment in 11th and 12th grade. My oldest started full-time DE at 14, and I graduated her from high school at 16. Even though they had far more credits than they needed, I still required them to take both a writing class and a literature class each year, so that was one or the other each semester.
So I still require English, science and math during the senior year, though they both had more than enough credits to meet college application requirements.
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What programs have you stuck with over the years, for multiple kids?
in K-8 Curriculum Board
Posted
K12 Phonicsworks (all four)
Story of the World (older three.. as much as I loved it with the older kids, I just didn't want to do it a fourth time.)
Singapore Math (older three)
K12 Science K-5 (older three)
K12 History K (younger three)
K12 Literary Analysis and Composition (older three... this is on my must-do list for high school prep)