OK, I need to some free time, so I am going to try to make this snappy. Excuse the editing if I miss a run-on sentence or something.
In a nutshell, this week was a challenge. I think it was only a challenge in my mind. I think we are all disengaging from the culture of trying to be just like public school at home and realizing that things are just different at home. A conversation that I have with an inquisitive child that only happens because he has the time and energy to even think and ask me these questions counts as learning. What grade can you put on a learner's spirit. I'm wondering about grades right now and I find myself questioning the idea of grading entirely.
I remember the program that we as parents were allowed to log on in real time and check the exact assignments our kids did and what grades they received in public school. First, I realized in a whole quarter of a year for my "high ability" student, that there were literally only a handful of things that were graded. A handful of things, people! I have no idea what he did all day, but I have a feeling that she was more like me than anything. She loves sparking curiosity and if I were to wager, the projects that they did were graded on a rubric, but a very kind rubric. I think she felt the students were successful if they were engaging and participating. She set the whole classroom up like that. No rows of students staring at a teacher gabbing all day...this is what I grew up with and it's hard to imagine what her classroom was like, I just know that it did not consist of rote memory work and classical drills all day. They were discussing, exploring, reading, researching, and
doing things. She personally developed the high-ability curriculum for the school and has I'm sure her very own philosophies on how to make a child successful and how to engage the thinking skills in her students. But, the idea that I should have hundreds of graded worksheets assessing the smarts of my kid for all to see just kind of turns me off, and I think she got that, too. As a dear friend said of her child who was diagnosed with learning disabilities, "We like to create more successes than failures."
Shouldn't that be true with anyone?
Now, my fifth grader also had less work than expect, but her grades were tallied at the very tail end of the quarter with little to no explanation. When I looked at her work I felt that the problems did not allow for a small misunderstanding of material. In other words, there wasn't much work that was actually graded, and when it was, if you made a mistake, it was a weighty mistake because of it. I know she was kind of upset that work she would have spent a whole night on was not actually even read or graded. "OK" was marked on the top showing that the teacher recognized she did her homework - it was just that. Home work...not to be actually graded and applied to her final grade. I have a hunch that this is somehow because many students simply don't do their homework anymore and assigning it is a way to seem like you're actually doing school, when in reality, the kids that didn't do it, simply don't get a sticker that day. Dumb. And it wasn't teaching my daughter that doing your work actually matters. So she began to not take it as seriously and she would lose her work sometimes. This was simply unheard of in my day. In fact, NO ONE ever DIDN'T do their work. That would have been punishable with a detention and a bad grade.
So I'm grading work but also letting myself recognize all of these valuable moments during the day that they are learning and their simply isn't a grade you can put on it. With that said, one of the my top objectives is to get them test ready and ACT/SAT proficient. Which means reading comprehension skills, and learning math techniques that will be helpful to solve harder problems. We will also be working a little more with word problems than I think the public school does.
As promised, here is a list of more resources that we are using:
Each child has a Spectrum Math book which covers the testable core objectives for that year. In addition we are using this text for my sixth grader:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0967991595/ref=ox_sc_sfl_title_9?ie=UTF8&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER
I will also start using this for my third grader soon when I feel he is comfortable with all the things he needed to learn in his fourth grade text (jumped up for high ability last year in public school).
We use these for grammar practice:
For English we are also encouraging lots of reading and we have already done a big project in relation to science where each of the two older kids did a presentation on any living thing that they wanted to do. They had to list which kingdom and other classification information, habitat, human interaction, challenges, diet, etc.
Sis did a presentation on sharks and brother did a presentation on European Glass Lizards. It was cute and fun. They both had to use proper grammar and also learned how to research and start remembering how to organize web pages and such for works cited.
