Posts Tagged homeschooler
Homeschool Records – Preparing for College
Posted on October 17, 2011 | Home Schooling.
Saving samples and records of your high school students work is an important aspect of preparing for college. Our recall is not always the best and being able to remember what your child did as a freshman could prove to be quite difficult without good record keeping.
When saving your student’s homeschool records it is a good idea to have a place to put each subject area that you teach and to put any papers there that you can find. If your student is writing something for English, it is hard to know what class it is eventually going to go into. It doesn’t really matter where you put it; what matters is that you put it somewhere.
Having a notebook with a subject tab is beneficial because it helps you figure out what subjects are lacking records. Colleges may ask to see work samples, but you never know what the colleges are going to ask for. Some colleges may want to see a lab write-up from a science class. Others may want to see a math paper or a math test. They may want to see the student’s own handwriting on the paper. One of the colleges that we applied to wanted a graded English paper.
I wrote a course description for each of the classes as we went along. I wrote it as a paragraph, listed the things we did or used, wrote every possible way that I evaluated them and put that on the bottom.
It’s important to know that the way you evaluate your children is not all about testing. Testing is a very small piece of how we evaluate our children. The kids in public schools are not solely evaluated on tests, either. When they go to school, they might be given a grade that’s based on many different things. If you, as a homeschooler, are only giving a grade based on your end of chapter tests, you’re putting them at a disadvantage against every other student.
Sometimes colleges will ask for other things from people as well. They will occasionally ask for more from a homeschooler, like a written paper. I’ve talked to a lot of colleges and they’re very frustrated at the state of education in our country. How they can have four years of English and come to college without the ability to read or write? Most college admissions will ask for samples from everyone, not only homeschoolers.
Homeschooling With the Right Learning Style
Posted on July 15, 2011 | Home Schooling.
There are a lot of different types of curriculums available on the homeschool market today. Instead of simply trying them all until you find one that will work for you, it is a good idea to take a look at your child’s learning style. This will actually help you to find the right curriculum for your child in a much shorter time period than if you had tried another method.
Considering Learning Style
Take a good, close look at your child’s strengths. As a homeschool parent, you probably already know what subjects your child really enjoys and which ones he really needs some help with. These are some things that you should keep in mind as you begin to look at the way that your child learns the best.
Whenever you are looking at your child’s learning style, there are some questions that you should ask yourself. These include: Does your child learn best whenever they use workbooks? Create notebooks? Act out a story? Or do something else?
Questions like these will help you to reduce the amount of inappropriate curriculum that you purchase and thus save you money. However, if you are still uncertain about what curriculum will work best for your family, you can always go online and look for a “learning style test” via the Search Engines. This will help answer your questions about your child’s learning style and understand it better too.
Consider The Various Options
Take a look at all of the options that are available to you as a homeschooler. There are also a lot of different methodologies available as well. You will find everything from “school at home” to unschooling (very relaxed, child led learning). It is easy to find a list of these homeschool styles with descriptions of each online. Consider visiting different homeschool curriculum websites too. There you will find a variety of textbooks and curriculum packages to choose from. You will need to make sure that they will cover the learning requirements within your state. Also, keep in mind that a complete curriculum package will contain all of the materials that you will need for the whole school year.