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I know school has just gotten underway but our house has already settled into a nice, no pressure routine. How is your after school going?

I have a 4th grader and we're continuing our read alouds, Spanish literacy, French heritage school homework (plus cursive!), history, and math facts. I need to yet cycle in typing, science, outlining, & spelling. It'd be nice to periodically work on robotics, woodworking, or some other 'build it' projects. I'd also like to get outdoors more and have her bike & skate. 

What type of schedule and organization do you keep? Rotations seem ideal to keep things in manageable chunks. My kid is more cooperative if it's just a 'bit here & there'. I'd also like to make science happen more & I have so many resources but since it's not my forte it tends to get left behind. Hmmm...

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We're about a month in, but we are still not really in a good routine.  For one thing, almost every weekend has been full of one-off activities such as campouts.  The last campout will be the first weekend of October.  (Then a series of birthdays and holidays will start ....)

7th grade is so much busier than 6th, which was already pretty busy.  Even though I cut out a couple of after-school activities, this change has been offset by an increase in activities for church youth (confirmation class etc.) and school sports (more practice time and games than before).  Also the girls have joined Power of the Pen, which meets in the morning before school.  I did talk them out of joining the yearbook staff.

School-wise, there is more consistent homework, which is good in the sense that the review of content is more effective.  (Though we could do without the weekly sketch book assignment, which takes up a lot of time for uncertain benefit at this age.)  Most days the girls have enough time to finish their homework if they focus, though some days are pretty full.

Mostly my kids are just not using time wisely.  They are very social at school, so they bring home more homework than they need to.  Also they feel the need to spend a lot of time on stuff like hair and nails, watching silly stuff on youtube, etc.  I'm not using my time so wisely either.  We end up getting to bed unacceptably late almost every day.  The girls are to the age where it's hard to force the issue.

I acquired copies of their 5 most important textbooks so that we could review at home, but we haven't really done much of that yet.  I also have some other books that I hoped to use to shore up key concepts, introduce vocabulary, etc.  I did start out doing this in the beginning, but once the homework started ramping up, my stuff got crowded out.  I do think we'll revive it once we get a more regular routine going.

I had decided to stop using Sylvan, but they told me I had 9 hours of paid tutoring leftover from summer, so I'm having one daughter do that for an hour on Saturdays this fall.  Once that is over, I plan to just take on the job myself.  That kid is also getting some tutoring in school.  The school district is supposed to be setting up a meeting to discuss helping her more, but I haven't heard back from them in a few weeks, so I probably need to prod them again.

As far as extra things other than book work, I haven't decided on much yet.  I am interested in attending live theater with them, and we continue to share audiobooks and read-alouds.  We get subscriptions of some magazines and engineering kits, but the kids aren't as interested as they used to be.  I haven't seen too much to interest them at the museums or library lately.  I signed up for one volunteer opportunity and have some others in mind, but I need to get the kids' buy-in, or they will just embarrass me.

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  • 2 weeks later...

My daughter is a high school freshman this year. This trimester, she has Math 2a, Honors English 1, Fundamentals of chemistry1/2, Marching band, and Marching band P.E. The most challenging and time consuming one of all is marching band. Her main wind instrument is bassoon, but she had to switch to clarinet for marching band season. Despite the incredible challenge of the new instrument and commitment, she is absolutely loving it. There was a week when she was all stressed out because she had pass offs piling up, but she managed to regain composure, cleared the backlog, and got into the competitive parade band as a freshman!

Outside of school, she is doing bassoon class as marching band schedule permits, as well as weekly piano, and Kathak dance classes.  

At home, afterschooling is bare bones. She starts the day with a few minutes of Spanish Maestro to keep at verb conjugations, then an audiobook at bedtime while she cleans up her bedroom. That's all we can fit in right now!

Once marching band season is over, we will ramp up Spanish again. She is thinking of joining a community swim club to practice twice a week to be ready for the school swim team last trimester, but we should still have more free time than at the moment. 

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We are a month into the school year and have settled on a routine for DD9, in 4th grade and DS6, in 1st grade. It’s not ideal, but it feels as balanced as we can hope for in terms of school, afterschool activities, afterschool academics, and free time. Both kids attend an immersion school and we are feebly attempting a third language with weekly lessons, though it’s way behind their immersion language.

DS6 is only assigned reading for homework, so we supplement with miquon and Singapore IP/CWP for math, and extra reading. My goal for him is to afterschool 3-4 days a week. Otherwise, he is busy with play dates and afterschool activities. 

DD9 has a busier schedule with sports and music every day of the week and daily homework. She usually has an hour gap in which she is waiting at the soccer field or pool before practice, so she uses that time for homework. On the two weekdays she is home before 730 pm, we afterschool before bedtime and limit it to 20-30 minutes. On the three weekdays she is home at 8/830 pm, we skip it altogether. We have longer sessions on weekend days to make up for it. It helps that I only afterschool in math and writing/reading comprehension. We are using Singapore IP/CWP and Beast Academy for math and Reading Detective and exercises from Writing Revolution and the Kilgallon books for reading/writing. I’m happy with the history, science, typing, coding and the immersion language taught at school.

It does require some prep time for me because we don’t have time for me to shuffle through materials. I’m feeling doubtful that we will be able to allocate the same amount of time once we hit the middle school years, but I guess we will cross that bridge later. 

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On 24 septembre 2018 at 6:56 PM, Earthmerlin said:

I know school has just gotten underway but our house has already settled into a nice, no pressure routine. How is your after school going?

I have a 4th grader and we're continuing our read alouds, Spanish literacy, French heritage school homework (plus cursive!), history, and math facts. I need to yet cycle in typing, science, outlining, & spelling. It'd be nice to periodically work on robotics, woodworking, or some other 'build it' projects. I'd also like to get outdoors more and have her bike & skate. 

What type of schedule and organization do you keep? Rotations seem ideal to keep things in manageable chunks. My kid is more cooperative if it's just a 'bit here & there'. I'd also like to make science happen more & I have so many resources but since it's not my forte it tends to get left behind. Hmmm...

I believe I've come up with a schedule draft. M-W-F we will try to focus on 30' of Math, plus French & Spanish. I will also do more of these subjects on the weekends but also fold in a 'Science Sunday''--Mystery Science, kits, readings &/or experiments. 

That's as far as I've gotten so far.

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Underthebridge 

how do you tackle planning for the week? We’re in same situation with dd 9 4th grade. She reluctant to do any extra work and I want to get her excited about learning again. So far we have soccer this season. Hoping to start reading comprehension and read alouds once soccer done (that will free up m/w/sat)

she has math assigned but struggles with word problems (she knows how to do but doesn’t like to bc of the thinking involved) 

any tips you’re using both to schedule yourself and to teach 4th grader would be helpful.

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7 hours ago, workingmom said:

Underthebridge 

how do you tackle planning for the week? We’re in same situation with dd 9 4th grade. She reluctant to do any extra work and I want to get her excited about learning again. So far we have soccer this season. Hoping to start reading comprehension and read alouds once soccer done (that will free up m/w/sat)

she has math assigned but struggles with word problems (she knows how to do but doesn’t like to bc of the thinking involved) 

any tips you’re using both to schedule yourself and to teach 4th grader would be helpful.

Hi workingmom, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Planning and motivation are two different beasts, and you need both to get anything done. 

At the end of the summer, I pull out all the material I would like to get through during the academic year. I count the lessons and put post it flags to mark off where we should be by the end of each trimester.  Those serve as a rough guide for me to see if we are on track during the school year. I don’t have a specific plan for each week because we would never be able to stick to it. Some weeks are just busier than others.

I spend a chunk of time upfront to proclick all their books so that I can pull pages out quickly. Each child has a folder. I pull the worksheets I want them to do, circle the problems I want them to answer, and change out their folders every day. I don’t assign every problem on every page. Sometimes for Singapore IP, DD9 just does the “Take the Challenge” section, especially for units like “Tables and Graphs” and “Shapes”. Eliminating the process of flipping through the books, struggling to keep them open to the right page, and trying to write in the creases, allows my kids to waste less time. 

Somehow, we manage to get through most of the materials by the end of the year, and anything remaining, we finish up in the summer.

As for motivation, kids respond in different ways. My younger child sees my older child doing it and thinks that’s just the way it is. Last year, DD9 went through a reluctant phase, so I showed her a clip of President Obama talking about how his mother woke him up at 4am every day to study. I explained that we afterschool to exercise her brain and make it powerful. I showed her last year’s math notebook and how she had struggled over problems that seem simple to her today. I explain that doing just a small amount every day can lead to amazing results. I try not to reward her for doing the work, but on Fridays, she has the option to do the work and have iPad time or not do any afterschooling or iPad at all. She usually chooses to do the work. It also helps that she has peers who also afterschool. Several of her friends also afterschool in one way or another and commiserating about it helps her to understand that it’s not just her. 

Sometimes we take a break for a week or two. Having my kids in full time school gives me the leeway to be able to do this and not feel any regrets about falling behind.

Word problems get tricky and time consuming for 4th grade and up. I tell my DD that this is real math. The reason we have math in the first place, is to solve word problems. And any time we use math in everyday life, it is to solve a word problem. 

Good luck! It’s so helpful for me to hear about what other people are doing and it’s great to learn from each other. 

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Well the midterm grades are coming through, and some of them aren't pretty.  The main issue continues to be poor use of time.  I begin to see why kids don't seem to learn much in middle school.  They just want to socialize all the time.  Then at home they feel like they need "down time" and sneak off to the room with the TV until I catch them.  Obviously I need to get mean - which I will do after my kid's birthday celebrations are over.  ?

My more challenged kid is doing great in life science though.  She wants to work with animals as an adult, so I think that motivates her to try extra hard.  She is generally a hard worker at home, just not great at prioritizing.  Many days we get up between 5am and 6am because she wants to be fresh for homework or wants to do a final review for a test or quiz.  Which would be fine if we went to bed at a reasonable hour.  Still working on that.

Some general observations / things to attack: 

  • Reading for school isn't happening with one kid.  She seems to think she can slide without it.  I'm not talking about independent book reading, which we cover well enough with audiobooks, read-alouds, and a little bit of fun/social reading.  I'm talking about reading the short story for literature homework, the chapters for science / social studies.  The amount they are asked to read in these subjects is very reasonable.  We need to buckle down.
  • Classwork is being left unfinished in a couple classes, by both kids.  I think I need to institute some kind of external motivation for classwork scores.
  • They waste time in aftercare (which they go to sometimes because of the activities schedule).  Better to spend an hour riding the bus home and then have an hour of actual homework time, than to sit around for 2 hours and finish 15 minutes of work.

The kids are both around a 3.5 average, so not terrible, but they need to clean up their sloppy habits.

Other than that, things are going pretty well.  The girls enjoy their friends, are active in extracurriculars, and get along reasonably with their teachers.  We've done some volunteering and attended some cultural/arts events.  Attitude at home is on the upswing, habits seem to be improving, and they make some effort to be healthy.  They are still talking to me, even though I'm a boring grown-up.  So far so good.

(There isn't much in there about afterschooling, because so far we haven't had much time for it.  This coming weekend is birthday celebrations, and after that, hopefully we can start a little extra work on weekends.)

Teacher meetings are next week.  I still need to sign up.  I guess we can discuss the extra help request that has been stagnant since August.

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5 hours ago, underthebridge said:

Hi workingmom, it’s difficult, isn’t it? Planning and motivation are two different beasts, and you need both to get anything done. 

Somehow, we manage to get through most of the materials by the end of the year, and anything remaining, we finish up in the summer.

As for motivation, kids respond in different ways. My younger child sees my older child doing it and thinks that’s just the way it is. Last year, DD9 went through a reluctant phase, so I showed her a clip of President Obama talking about how his mother woke him up at 4am every day to study. I explained that we afterschool to exercise her brain and make it powerful

Good luck! It’s so helpful for me to hear about what other people are doing and it’s great to learn from each other. 

 

 

Yes, please forward me the video clip, that might resonate with her. 

I will prep ahead of time and see how we can motivate and just have a sense of self confidence with the work.

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, workingmom said:

 

Yes, please forward me the video clip, that might resonate with her. 

I will prep ahead of time and see how we can motivate and just have a sense of self confidence with the work.

 

 

 

There are several clips of him talking about it - here is one in a speech he gave to a school. He talks about it in the first couple of minutes. He gave quite a number of “back to school” speeches that are inspirational.

 

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On 9 octobre 2018 at 6:51 PM, underthebridge said:

There are several clips of him talking about it - here is one in a speech he gave to a school. He talks about it in the first couple of minutes. He gave quite a number of “back to school” speeches that are inspirational.

 

LOVE IT!

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 10/10/2018 at 4:50 AM, SKL said:

Well the midterm grades are coming through, and some of them aren't pretty.  The main issue continues to be poor use of time.  I begin to see why kids don't seem to learn much in middle school.  They just want to socialize all the time.  Then at home they feel like they need "down time" and sneak off to the room with the TV until I catch them.  Obviously I need to get mean - which I will do after my kid's birthday celebrations are over.  ?

My more challenged kid is doing great in life science though.  She wants to work with animals as an adult, so I think that motivates her to try extra hard.  She is generally a hard worker at home, just not great at prioritizing.  Many days we get up between 5am and 6am because she wants to be fresh for homework or wants to do a final review for a test or quiz.  Which would be fine if we went to bed at a reasonable hour.  Still working on that.

Some general observations / things to attack: 

  • Reading for school isn't happening with one kid.  She seems to think she can slide without it.  I'm not talking about independent book reading, which we cover well enough with audiobooks, read-alouds, and a little bit of fun/social reading.  I'm talking about reading the short story for literature homework, the chapters for science / social studies.  The amount they are asked to read in these subjects is very reasonable.  We need to buckle down.
  • Classwork is being left unfinished in a couple classes, by both kids.  I think I need to institute some kind of external motivation for classwork scores.
  • They waste time in aftercare (which they go to sometimes because of the activities schedule).  Better to spend an hour riding the bus home and then have an hour of actual homework time, than to sit around for 2 hours and finish 15 minutes of work.

The kids are both around a 3.5 average, so not terrible, but they need to clean up their sloppy habits.

Other than that, things are going pretty well.  The girls enjoy their friends, are active in extracurriculars, and get along reasonably with their teachers.  We've done some volunteering and attended some cultural/arts events.  Attitude at home is on the upswing, habits seem to be improving, and they make some effort to be healthy.  They are still talking to me, even though I'm a boring grown-up.  So far so good.

(There isn't much in there about afterschooling, because so far we haven't had much time for it.  This coming weekend is birthday celebrations, and after that, hopefully we can start a little extra work on weekends.)

Teacher meetings are next week.  I still need to sign up.  I guess we can discuss the extra help request that has been stagnant since August.

Your kid's school is do different from what we have here.  Ds11 supposedly has homework but I rarely see it and the times I have it took about 15 minutes for the week's worth.  I don't think he has ever had a test to study for beyond times tables or spelling and I have never seen a textbook used.  He goes to bed at 8 to 8.30 and we spend half an hour or so on AOPS PA then (we have made it through the exponents chapter finally but I think we will loop back and review it later. He does a tennis lesson Mondays and intercounty tennis Saturday plus I may sign him up for a Judo lesson a week if it doesn't clash.

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16 hours ago, kiwik said:

Your kid's school is do different from what we have here.  Ds11 supposedly has homework but I rarely see it and the times I have it took about 15 minutes for the week's worth.  I don't think he has ever had a test to study for beyond times tables or spelling and I have never seen a textbook used.  He goes to bed at 8 to 8.30 and we spend half an hour or so on AOPS PA then (we have made it through the exponents chapter finally but I think we will loop back and review it later. He does a tennis lesson Mondays and intercounty tennis Saturday plus I may sign him up for a Judo lesson a week if it doesn't clash.

Yeah, here in 7th grade they have homework every day - time varies depending on how easy it is for the particular child.  One of my kids finishes a lot of it at school, but even she usually has some to bring home.

Usually every week they have the following which my eldest nearly always does at home:

  • 1 Art sketch book assignment, which takes at least an hour.
  • 6 to 10 essay questions about world history, based on the text.  (About 6-10 pages of text reading per week?)
  • Study and write notes for a world history test or quiz (actual quiz/test usually every other week).+
  • Occasionally an online project for social studies.
  • About 5 science worksheets based on the text.  (About 6 pages of text reading per week.)
  • Usually a science quiz or test every week.
  • Math - usually a page of problems OR test study every day.  Also they are supposed to review their notebook every day.
  • Spelling / vocabulary - 40 homework questions + 20 word spelling test each week.
  • Grammar - an assignment every other night, alternating between paragraph writing and grammar exercises.
  • Literature - they read short stories and have several workbook pages to do each week, though much is done in class.
  • Religion - occasionally they have one or two workbook pages to complete at home weekly.
  • Memory work - usually 2 Bible passages per week.
  • Spanish - they have study guide with about 40-50 words they are supposed to know for their weekly quiz.
  • PE - occasionally they have a written test / study guide sent home.

In addition, my kids are in band, and while there is no required minimum practice time, obviously they need to do some.

The majority of the work is not announced in advance, so most can't be done on weekends.

This is all quite reasonable for my youngest, but it is difficult for my eldest whose memory is not great.  It can easily add up to 3 or 4 hours a night.

My eldest does not have study halls due to participation in band, choir, and tutoring at school.

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It is fair to say that what takes ds11 ten minutes may take other kids longer particularly maths. When my kids started school my workmates told me their kids did 30 minutes homework every night but apart from reading my kids always did all their homework for the week while waiting for their gym class Monday. It is pretty rare for them to get spelling words they don't know after one read through and I refuse to make them write out words they know.  The "age appropriate activities" they had for a while we're worse though - as a single working mother I don't want to be told what my kids should do after school.  Homework has always been handed out Monday and marked in class Friday so weekends when I have time never worked.  We opted out by picking the things we sort of did anyway. NZ doesn't really do much (often none really) science or history until high school.  Except for the minimal amount in social studies history is optional anyway.  I have always afterschooled history for that reason.  

I do think though, that that is an insane amount of homework and it would make me wonder why they hired teachers who were so incompepetent they couldn't cover more in class.  

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