Homeschooling
Three posts in a row today from parents coping while trying to cope with work and upset schedules, two frustrated, one doing well. This on top of a phone call to a niece, another call from a friend who is a concerned grandma looking for solutions, and an email exchange.
About the only thing I can claim as a veteran teacher is learning how to adjust fast to extraordinary circs. Like the time a teacher called in with a disastrous health failure, and though I was teaching afternoons at the time, the admin needed someone who could handle a large class of second graders. ASAP, that morning.
And when I got there, I discovered in looking through the teacher's staff book that she had probably been sick for a while--there were no lesson plans, what's more, she'd been stashing the kids' work into a cupboard, uncorrected, for a week or so. And things had quietly slid before that.
Other times there were flus that took out half the class, so going forward with a major unit couldn't happen and I had to fill in interim stuff, and of course stuff to do during the very rare rainy days, and more often when the heat and smog were so stunning that just eating at the lunch benches (outside) reduced the kids to crimson wet noodles.
So I've thrown out some suggestions for projects that keeps kids learning what they need to, even if it's not mandated busywork in workbooks and the like. Your go-getter can be self-motivated. It's the other kids, who were like most of us, easily bored, often restless, disliking change in the routine once the novelty wore off, that needed focus.
Easily my most popular project, which can be adapted for first grade on up, is The Autobiography. Very few kids didn't get into that. What's more, it was wildly popular at Open House--and some parents gave the finished projects to grandparents and the like.
Each day the kids would work on one page. The small ones did mostly art, and just labelled their drawings.
First page: family tree. Older kids could include birthdays, and any other stuff they wanted. They can illustrate or print out pix, or whatever they want. Smalls draw pictures of their families. Who goes into it? The kid decides. I had one kid who knew her mom had gotten her by artificial means, so she drew all the women in her life in her tree. The kids with blended families put everybody in there (the girl with three dads and two step moms had quite the branches, but she meticulously drew in each half and step kid, paying attention to relative size, hair color, eye color, and favorite outfits.)
The next page is the self portrait. Older kids could get creative, little ones drew utterly charming pictures. sometimes it was surprising to see what they thought important to record about themselves.
Next page: older kids (fourth grade and up) interview older relatives about what they remember of the day of the kid's birth.
Next page: rogues gallery: portraits of friends, write about what you enjoy about them, or make pictures.
Next page, my favorite day/my worst day (these could be split up, especially for those writing the memories out.) The sports-minded boys usually wrote about the best game they ever played, and the worst.
After that comes memory stuff, as much or as little as required to fit the time. My typical day, what I'd like to do next Halloween, If I had Wings/could be invisible, etc etc. What you remember as a little child for the older ones, how far back, etc could get them absorbed. Smalls, I had them draw themselves and friends playing their favorite games and labelling them.
Then for fourth grade and up, "Write a story about what you will be doing in ten years."
Bind these and give them away, or save them. Twice I had kids come back to visit the school and come by to tell me that they still had their autobiographies and what a gas it was to look through them.
The thinking behind it was to prepare the kids for writing research papers. After it was all over I told them to look at how many pages they'd generated, and how they'd followed the same basic steps for writing a paper: research in various ways, organize thoughts, write. Add suitable media if needed.
There was no wrong answer, as it was all about themselves. I told them if they picked interesting topics for future papers, it would be almost as much fun.
If they asked for correction I gave it to them, otherwise I left their creative spelling and punctuation as was (and told the parents at the beginning of the year that this was the only work that would go uncorrected--there were always those helicopter parents who wanted to come in and retype everything, as they did for all their kids' work, no matter how hard we tried to get them to let the kids make their own mistakes. "But that won't get them into Stanford" was the usual retort.)
Other than that, talking to kids about what they read and saw, while working on small projects, tested comprehension in a low-key way. Then there were the more creative approaches for kids leaning that way: write a chapter in your favorite book, a scene that fits in, or a what happened after, make a diorama of a favorite book.
There's other stuff, but those are the main ones I've passed along, so they are there for anyone interested.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1030129.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
About the only thing I can claim as a veteran teacher is learning how to adjust fast to extraordinary circs. Like the time a teacher called in with a disastrous health failure, and though I was teaching afternoons at the time, the admin needed someone who could handle a large class of second graders. ASAP, that morning.
And when I got there, I discovered in looking through the teacher's staff book that she had probably been sick for a while--there were no lesson plans, what's more, she'd been stashing the kids' work into a cupboard, uncorrected, for a week or so. And things had quietly slid before that.
Other times there were flus that took out half the class, so going forward with a major unit couldn't happen and I had to fill in interim stuff, and of course stuff to do during the very rare rainy days, and more often when the heat and smog were so stunning that just eating at the lunch benches (outside) reduced the kids to crimson wet noodles.
So I've thrown out some suggestions for projects that keeps kids learning what they need to, even if it's not mandated busywork in workbooks and the like. Your go-getter can be self-motivated. It's the other kids, who were like most of us, easily bored, often restless, disliking change in the routine once the novelty wore off, that needed focus.
Easily my most popular project, which can be adapted for first grade on up, is The Autobiography. Very few kids didn't get into that. What's more, it was wildly popular at Open House--and some parents gave the finished projects to grandparents and the like.
Each day the kids would work on one page. The small ones did mostly art, and just labelled their drawings.
First page: family tree. Older kids could include birthdays, and any other stuff they wanted. They can illustrate or print out pix, or whatever they want. Smalls draw pictures of their families. Who goes into it? The kid decides. I had one kid who knew her mom had gotten her by artificial means, so she drew all the women in her life in her tree. The kids with blended families put everybody in there (the girl with three dads and two step moms had quite the branches, but she meticulously drew in each half and step kid, paying attention to relative size, hair color, eye color, and favorite outfits.)
The next page is the self portrait. Older kids could get creative, little ones drew utterly charming pictures. sometimes it was surprising to see what they thought important to record about themselves.
Next page: older kids (fourth grade and up) interview older relatives about what they remember of the day of the kid's birth.
Next page: rogues gallery: portraits of friends, write about what you enjoy about them, or make pictures.
Next page, my favorite day/my worst day (these could be split up, especially for those writing the memories out.) The sports-minded boys usually wrote about the best game they ever played, and the worst.
After that comes memory stuff, as much or as little as required to fit the time. My typical day, what I'd like to do next Halloween, If I had Wings/could be invisible, etc etc. What you remember as a little child for the older ones, how far back, etc could get them absorbed. Smalls, I had them draw themselves and friends playing their favorite games and labelling them.
Then for fourth grade and up, "Write a story about what you will be doing in ten years."
Bind these and give them away, or save them. Twice I had kids come back to visit the school and come by to tell me that they still had their autobiographies and what a gas it was to look through them.
The thinking behind it was to prepare the kids for writing research papers. After it was all over I told them to look at how many pages they'd generated, and how they'd followed the same basic steps for writing a paper: research in various ways, organize thoughts, write. Add suitable media if needed.
There was no wrong answer, as it was all about themselves. I told them if they picked interesting topics for future papers, it would be almost as much fun.
If they asked for correction I gave it to them, otherwise I left their creative spelling and punctuation as was (and told the parents at the beginning of the year that this was the only work that would go uncorrected--there were always those helicopter parents who wanted to come in and retype everything, as they did for all their kids' work, no matter how hard we tried to get them to let the kids make their own mistakes. "But that won't get them into Stanford" was the usual retort.)
Other than that, talking to kids about what they read and saw, while working on small projects, tested comprehension in a low-key way. Then there were the more creative approaches for kids leaning that way: write a chapter in your favorite book, a scene that fits in, or a what happened after, make a diorama of a favorite book.
There's other stuff, but those are the main ones I've passed along, so they are there for anyone interested.
This entry was originally posted at https://sartorias.dreamwidth.org/1030129.html. Please comment there using OpenID.