Starting HS in the summer to ease into and catch up

[workingmom]

So DD had a rough two years in private school where she academically OK but taking a lot of extra time at home to stay on top of things. I've noticed a lot of gaps and they are big on standardized testing. She really wants to  homeschool and so I've agreed to let her homeschool in the summer and will assess. While her two older brothers homeschooled for several years they were far more studious and listened well to directions 🙂

We're taking it easy and limiting to core focus areas. She is 9 and finished 4th grade (will likely do this 3-4 days a week)

30 mins Math (drills, review last year concepts, maybe move ahead)

30 minutes reading outloud/comphrension (Starting with the Borrowers)/ alternating a few days with basic grammar review

1 hour science (this is her favorite subject, and I had wanted to limit to 30 minutes) but we'll read out of a fourth grade text and follow up with MSB videos

1 hour outdoor play

15 mins- typing practice (learning)

 

Suggestions. She's super excited colored a binder and and organized a planner. I'm hoping we don't clash personalities

 

[Kiara.I]

Usually, a period of deschooling is recommended before starting homeschooling. I'm concerned that schooling through the summer might make things harder for you both.

[Melissa in Australia]

sounds terrific

 🙂

 I remember when I took my older ones out of school. What I did was start off with 3 core subjects then each week add a new subject. that way we still had the routine of "school" they weren't bored and it wasn't overwhelming. They still had hours more free time a day than when they were at school so deschooling was not an issue for me. We did school work year round with breaks on  especially nice days for trips to the beach etc.

 

[serendipitous journey]

Looks good to me! 

I find it helpful to use outside schedules/self-scheduling materials with my one who is more challenging ... along those lines, one change you might make is to plan on a certain amount of work each day and not the time-per-day.  Time-per-day seems to work well with fairly self-motivated children or ones who are in the groove, but for my challenging child it just causes dallying and malaise.  He does much better with daily assignments.  If I think I may have assigned too much then I let him know that if he is clearly working hard and it takes him beyond a certain amount of time he can take a break (or stop for the day -- depends on the situation).

Planning amount of work per day can take some refining, so I start out with reasonable guesses and only plan a day or a week, then tweak each day until I'm able to come up with a reliable schedule.  Or use self-scheduled materials (as in, 1 or 2 lessons of a grammar book or a day's chunk of Singapore/MEP or whatever). 

ETA: in our house, the key to not-clashing has been an "us versus them" mentality: he & I are in it together against the program's work 😉 

Edited May 22, 2019 by serendipitous journey

[PeterPan]

9 hours ago, workingmom said:

Suggestions. She's super excited colored a binder and and organized a planner. I'm hoping we don't clash personalities

She sounds like what Cathy Duffy calls a Perfect Paula. You could talk with her about giving her stuff she can just DO. A lot of your list is dependent on you, involves waiting for you. If she's got this let me sit down and do it kinda personality, you can look for materials conducive to that. They don't have to be bad or inferior. I use this series for word problems with my ds, and it's GREAT. https://www.evan-moor.com/p/20078/Evan-Moor-Daily-Word-Problems-Teacher’s-Edition-E-Book-Grade-4  It would be a great complement to either your together math time or a math workbook approach. I use these worksheets from Tang Math https://tangmath.com/products/subscription  for daily drill/fact fluency. If you buy now and write them an email, they can let you have this year's subscription to download and use over the summer.

9 hours ago, workingmom said:

1 hour science (this is her favorite subject, and I had wanted to limit to 30 minutes) but we'll read out of a fourth grade text

Again, there are worksheet and workbook approaches that are very good that could go in that pretty binder she's wanting. It's just something to think through. I'm with you on all the joys of reading aloud, blah blah, but my ds does better with highly structured materials that he can just sit down and do. It took me a while to find things he could do that fit the way he needs to work but don't compromise on the thought process I want to see. And then what I found was that, shhh, some of these workbooks are BETTER than what I was doing other ways.

https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/series/180-days-of-practice-206/  I like the geography and social studies workbooks from this series

https://www.evan-moor.com/p/2770/Daily-Science-Grade-4  This science gets them to think about the material, make connections across days, etc. And maybe your text has a workbook. My ds has SLDs in reading, writing, and math, so I'm always wanting to make sure he's reading everything on the page and learning all the comprehension skills. 

And you know maybe that doesn't fit at all and in that case just ignore. I'm just agreeing with you that fitting her workstyle and her personality will probably be more important than deschooling. It sounds like she's already good on working with you. Just knowing that you've had problems before, that's where I'd focus your efforts. You're saying she's not good at following directions. Do you know WHY? That would be really helpful to pin down if you could. A dc this age usually wants to please, so there's probably something there. For instance it could be working memory or difficulty with language or low processing speed. My dd was sort of easy and hard to work with at the same time, and it turned out what was frustrating us was very low processing speed and word retrieval. By the time she processed so much LANGUAGE, she was worn out, bogged down, couldn't get it out. So I'm noticing you're using language, language, language all day long with her, every single thing on the list driven by language, and you're saying something is going wrong. That would be a place to look. And for us, that took neuropsych evals.

I got blown off when I first looked into evals for dd. She was 6 and the receptionist was like why?? I'm like I don't know, just this sense. Well fast forward to age 10 and we were having a lot of problems. Her scores were always great, but you couldn't say quite what was wrong. So now I'm much more aggressive on evals and likely to recommend them, because they give you the information to do better. My dd is now using accommodations in college btw. It wasn't me or my teaching. She really legit had issues. She's also highly capable and on their top scholarship. She just had some issues that we needed information on to be able to work better and work in a more understanding way.

[73349]

Looks good to me, but trying it out will show you how that works for you and her. Re: reading out loud, do you mean she will read aloud, or you will? If the former, her voice will likely not hold out that long at first.

We always do a light summer schedule that gives my child enough structure & lets us have fairly short days the rest of the year. We tend to go by lesson (e.g., these two pages of math) rather than by time.

[Miss Tick]

It is awesome that she enjoys science, but keep in mind that for elementary years science can be really flexible and interest driven, so don't feel wedded to the textbook. If she finds library books she wants to read or videos she wants to watch or experiments she wants to do follow those interests! High school sciences start at zero every time, so there is no particular background that must be covered ahead of time.

[workingmom]

12 hours ago, whitehawk said:

Looks good to me, but trying it out will show you how that works for you and her. Re: reading out loud, do you mean she will read aloud, or you will? If the former, her voice will likely not hold out that long at first.

Good point. Maybe will take turns and add in the reading comprehension guide sheets into this.

Definitely will tweak as we get going. I thought 20 mins of math was perfect but she was insisting on more. I think the goal is try to get most of this done early in the day.

[ScoutTN]

Just don't let her miss the summer fun stuff, whatever that is for your family. You don't want to get to late September with a kid who is burned out and needs a break! 

I agree about non-textbook based science for youngers. Math, reading, typing, Read Alouds, and call it good. 

 

[workingmom]

so an update. things going relatively well. of course first few days done to the "t" then a few days about half done what we planned. But she did start a craft business so spending some time working on samples and keeping track of orders (mentally calculating profits). we've been including the lapbooks/ws and MSB videos for science so less bookwork.