Review

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...revise, reflect, recapitulate (great word), ruminate...

That is what I am doing this week. And I'm writing here to think "out loud," and to be accountable to myself.



This is our "testing" week. For those of you homeschoolers who do not "test," that is the week in which we review nine weeks worth of material and "examine" (maybe "evaluate" is a nicer word) how well we have learned the material. If you use Seton, it's "testing" week. We review and we test, for a grade, given by someone other than me. For people like me, it is called "accountability" week.

I have the tendency (personality flaw) to let things go. A little. Do the daily work, but not the tracking. So during testing week I find that I have some grades recorded and some grades unrecorded and then I go mad trying to figure out which is which.

Some families who test do not record grades. They just test each quarter and that's the quarter grade. And that's great if it meets your needs. In fact, that takes a real load of the teacher's desk (a load of papers to grade, that is). But for our family, I am teaching grade school, and preparing my young students to attend high school (well, we don't know about the girl yet). Which means at some point in time, they will need to understand that all their work counts.

My high schooler does homework in most subjects every day. In most subjects, the teacher collects the homework and grades it. In other words -- everything counts. And because my 12-year-old will attend the same all-boys school, he must learn that he cannot screw off for nine weeks and then study hard for the final. Everything counts.

And so, I am reviewing our method of tracking and revising this week. I need to find a better system for keeping track of grades. I use a grade book, but you actually have to grade the paper and enter a grade for the grade book to be helpful. That's where the system fails. I think I'm going to have to establish a "reward system" for myself. I just have to think of something that has enough perceived value to make it worth the extra time involved in being more organized. Any suggestions?




I am also reviewing our daily schedule and subjects. I am adding Latin back in this semester. We started at the beginning of the year, but then I lapsed. Latin is not part of our curriculum and thus I have to plan it myself. For those of you who plan everything yourself, you probably think "Oh, brother!" You'd be right. I'm most pathetic in this manner, which is why I use Seton. I recognize and admit my flaws.

So Latin is back (Latina Christiana I), and I would really like to re-incorporate world geography. A couple years ago we did an entire year of world geography. I had to plan it myself, and I did (pat on back), and we really enjoyed it. I didn't use a textbook, but this website. It is fee-based, but it's cheap -- as cheap as a book. It is time-consuming for me though, because I have to collect the information, format it and create study guides. I'm going to sincerely try again. We studied South America and Central America a few years ago, so I may start with Europe just to make it easy on me.




Which brings me to my last subject of review and revising. I make study guides for several subjects every week. These are usually questions that are printed in the textbook and must be asked orally or answered on paper. I type them up as fill-in-the-blank sentences or matching/ multiple choice questions, and my student finds and fills in the answers. I find these to be helpful because my student can use them later to review (hence the term "study guide"). The method is great, but I find myself scrambling each Sunday afternoon to get them done for the next week. I don't like scrambling, so I need to plan farther ahead.




And at this point in my ruminating I can see the magic word...planning, planning, planning. My downfall, my weakness, my adversary. I can see I'm going to have to do much more thinking on that reward system. Did you say a trip to Hawaii? Sounds good to me.









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