Evaluating Daily Work – How's that going for you?

When a child turns in a written narration, or brings it to you for review, where do you start?Do you have a checklist of sorts that you begin with, or do you do an overall reading first?What’s on that checklist?Is content more important than mechanics?Is what’s said in grand discussion more important than oral narration?What helped you set your standard or goals for your children’s responses?When and how do you say “no way!” this isn’t going to cut it?

My daughter types her writing assignments. I sit down with her and we go over each assignment and correct it together. When we first started this, years ago, I would always repeat the main errors we needed to look for. Over time, the list grew shorter as she made less and less mistakes. Now, I have her check her work for those things before calling me to check it with her. Sometimes, there is nothing to correct. Usually there are 2-3 things that need correction or where I challenge her to find a better way to word something.

Our checklist is simply, check for run on sentences, proper punctuation, capitalization, and try not to use the word “but”. Those are the issues she has struggled with in the past. At this point, her punctuation and capitalization are good, she just needs to continue to work mostly on run on sentences and finding better ways to word things.

I believe content to be more important than mechanics because a good writer can be a good writer and still have poor mechanical writing skills as long as he has a good editor. 🙂

That said, we always correct both, mechanics and content. I mostly focus on encouragement and try to keep corrections to a minimum but I don’t compromise on basic writing mechanics at this age. She needs to correct her work. I do try to keep my suggestions on better wording down to a minimum so as not to overwhelm her with correction.

I’ve rarely had to tell her that her writing isn’t going to cut it. Writing comes natural to her so her assignments usually just need a smidge of polishing.

I’m more focused on encouragement. I want my children to feel good about writing so I try to sandwich criticism with praise and keep things on a positive note.

After reading various college level papers, I feel confident that my daughter will be able to hold her own when the time comes.

A few years ago, attending a central NY community college info. seminar, I learned that homeschool children were rated heavily on the entrance writing, reading and algebra exams and not as much with their high school grades. They need to satisfy all the HS requirements shown on a transcript, but grading for homeschoolers varies based on the grading methodology. So since I learned that, I have submitted all my children’s quarterly reports with satisfactory and unsatisfactory for grades. Also, it should be noted I’ve never reported an Unsatisfactory. It would have to be explained in depth what the retraining would have to be.

Not giving grades is so freeing, especially with scm method. My time isn’t taken up with grading, I have so much more time to read more living books.

Before anyone just jumps into this philosophy check with your school district and with possible college choices. Martha

P.S. our family just finished with the science read aloud, A Black Bear’s Story by Emil Liers from our town library. Great author, keep your eyes opened for him at sales.

This was a great thread! Thank you!