Grade-oriented thoughts are creeping in...

[EMS83]

I don't know where from, but I'm starting to think things like, "If I do 5 days of grammar with DS for X months, he'll be caught up to where he's supposed to be by Y date."  What the?!??

 

I also keep referring to them by their would-be grade level.  It's annoying me but I don't know how to stop!

 

Has anyone who tries to de-emphasize grade levels and keeping up had this trouble?  How did/do you overcome it??  We're supposed to be a relaxed homeschool, but I'm not feeling all that laid back these days.

 

P.S. No offense to those who do like grade levels and keeping up and such, it's just not been a part of our family culture and I don't really want to start now.

[Jean in Newcastle]

I just look for materials that challenge my children but yet don't frustrate them. 

[Guest]

I feel your pain. I do the same thing. I wish I didn't. What helps me is to repeat "We are making progress. We ARE making progress." It is hard not to compare and say Child Z would be x grade this fall but we are x years below that. AGGG!!! Freak out! I try to repeat the above and see how far they have come and remember they are much more than a specific grade level. 

 

 

[Arcadia]

Maybe it is because this time of the year is when state testing occur and people with kids in public schools are talking about it?

 

Some summer camps here go by grade level instead of age. I find that I have to switch from age to grade level depending on who is the provider. Like my kids summer music and art enrichment class go by grade level but their beginner tennis go by age.

[Ellie]

I don't know where from, but I'm starting to think things like, "If I do 5 days of grammar with DS for X months, he'll be caught up to where he's supposed to be by Y date."  What the?!??

 

I also keep referring to them by their would-be grade level.  It's annoying me but I don't know how to stop!

 

Has anyone who tries to de-emphasize grade levels and keeping up had this trouble?  How did/do you overcome it??  We're supposed to be a relaxed homeschool, but I'm not feeling all that laid back these days.

 

P.S. No offense to those who do like grade levels and keeping up and such, it's just not been a part of our family culture and I don't really want to start now.

 

I always referred to my children by their ages, not by the grade levels they would have been in if they'd gone to school. However, I knew what grade they would have been in, because that's where I placed them for Sunday school and other activities that grouped children by grade level instead of by age. And I "promoted" them in the fall ("Presto, change-o! now you are in fourth grade! Go forth and prosper!"), even though our Official School Year began January 1 and ended December 31.

 

I don't know what will help you quit fixating on grade level. I tend to be a little OCD, so that I completely embraced John Holt's unschooling approach from the very beginning (I read all of his books in about two weeks, before I withdrew my 6yo dd from school at Easter vacation), so it was never an issue for me. I am still puzzled by homeschoolers who do grade levels and September-through-June school years and the whole thing, but to each his own. 

 

Anyway, all that to say that you're a grown-up, and you just have to tell yourself to knock it off. :D

[EMS83]

Maybe because we've recently been attending a church with a lot of school teachers in it, although that's been the case before without this problem.  Otherwise, we're not actually around public schooled kids.  I literally have no idea when they end for the year and no idea what they teach at what age.

 

I do August to July for reporting and record-keeping purposes, and grade level is part of our state reporting.  Except for the grade-age association, I guess my thinking is focused on our programs.  DD is 10 working on level 3 in math (definitely below her ability level).  I forgot about starting grammar for DS, so he's 8 1/2 starting level 1.  Although his intelligence and his maturity are not even at. all.  This temptation to hurry them along or not call the day on account of sun is no good--and I'm giving in to it.  That's the annoying part.  We're going to a museum today and I was seriously considering where we'd fit in seatwork before I realized what I was doing!  This is not my usual mode, so that's why I'm posting about it.

 

I will try to tell myself to knock it off!  

 

And I might pick up some John Holt; I haven't read him.

 

[catz]

To me, grade level IS just an age designation. My son went to school for 2 years and his first grade class there were kids struggling with phonics to kids reading at junior high level. There are 12th graders with near perfect ACT scores and a transcript full of AP/DE classes that are Harvard bound, to kids who will barely get through minimal graduation requirements. Kids in B&M schools fall along a continuum. Leveling varies widely even among various curriculum and the numbers a publisher will chose put on them.

 

Anyway, I use grade level to designate my kids but only as a standard way to group kids of a certain age. I don't really think of it as more than that. We just march along with whatever is next for them to learn.

[Acadie]

Grade levels are superficial and do not address individual differences, but sometimes when I've had thoughts like that I realized there was something more substantive bothering me. 

 

I think it's ok to recognize that at some point in the future, external standards will be applied to your children, and to figure out what you want to be doing given your commitment to a relaxed home school, your kids' ages, interests and abilities, and what options they might want to be able to pursue in the future. For me, it does bug me when my kids are behind grade level in math. Grammar would be much less of a concern to me personally, as long as they're making progress in reading and writing (this could be because our family life is heavy on language arts experiences and my kids gravitate in that direction, but we need to work a little harder to integrate math into our lives).

 

It's going to look different in every family, but I think somewhere in middle childhood it becomes clear that the totally open days of early childhood are changing, and that adolescence and transitions to adulthood are ahead. I like that as homeschoolers we can take these transitions very gently and gradually, based on our individual kids and our own preferences. When something's persistently bugging me, if often signals a small tweak I want to make in my parenting or home schooling, so I tend to see my own annoyance as an invitation to discern what that might be. Often it's a small thing, but the shift feels dramatically better to me. 

 

Amy

[DawnM]

Well, because even the HS curricula categorizes the kids by grade levels.

 

Church categorizes the kids by grade levels.

 

Coops categorize by grade levels.

 

Sports categorize by grade levels.

I don't think you can get around it.  

 

 

[Ellie]

Well, because even the HS curricula categorizes the kids by grade levels.

 

Church categorizes the kids by grade levels.

 

Coops categorize by grade levels.

 

Sports categorize by grade levels.

I don't think you can get around it.  

 

Not all homeschool materials are categorized by grade levels.

 

Co-ops *shouldn't* categorize by grade levels, but maybe that's another reason I never participated in any, lol.

 

You cannot get around grade levels for group activities, but you can still refer to your children by ages not grades. In the history of the world, this is a fairly new phenomena.

 

Grade levels are handy for group activities, because sometimes it's helpful to have children of similar ages together. And it's easy to use grade levels. If I ran a co-op, though, I would use date of birth and not grade level. Homeschoolers do weird things with grade levels, lol, but they can't mess with date of birth. :-)

[Bluegoat]

This might be just from having a lot of that social pressure to compete around.

 

But I also think to some extent it is a legitimate way we think about whether what we are doing is on the right track.  It can sometimes be difficult to judge our progress in a subject.  So a parent wonders, is the child having a problem I need to address, am I having a problem or the program, am I misreading how much challenge I can include?  If you know where you compare to other students, you can at least get some generalized baseline to start thinking about this.  If there is just you and your student, it can be tricky.

 

I also think that at some point it starts to matter whether kids will have the skills to do other things that may be required of them, so we start to have some more external motivators.

 

And kids can start to drag their feet purposefully or because they just aren't enjoying the work, which adds to the complication.

 

Like someone up-thread said, I think the older kids get the more these things come into play.

[catz]

Not all homeschool materials are categorized by grade levels.

 

Co-ops *shouldn't* categorize by grade levels, but maybe that's another reason I never participated in any, lol.

 

 

Well, our co-op does use grade levels sometime.  But the vast majority of our teachers are teaching to a high level in an open ended way to the kids that walk through their door.  They might offer high school biology for 7th grade+. Kids tend to get out of it what they put into it.  Projects tend to come in at all sorts of different levels.  They might have another class like world history, and the papers kids bring in as homework are at all different levels.  They aren't graded. 

 

So although our co-op uses grade levels, it's not teaching anything called for instance "7th grade grammar" that's very lockstep.  The teacher ends up customizing to the kids in the class which is what can happen when an "expert" teacher is focusing on a small group of kids.  The only exception to this at our co-op is leveled math like Alg 1, Alg 2, etc.  Those are the only classes following a more definite scope and sequence.

 

Anyway - we've been happy with our co-op in this way.  And my kids generally perform well above "grade level" according to standardized tests (which are mandatory in our state).  As do many of their grade peers in b&m schools.  I still consider them their age/grade level.  If they want to graduate early at some point during the teen years and it seems their maturity and focus is leaning that way, we'll possibly talk about it. 

Edited April 26, 2016 by WoolySocks