Independent Study…

That gets discussed a lot on the yahoo group!   It is a bit of a training thing (As well of course a heart issue) – I know math is a common subject that gets done – I know of some moms that have the kids do their math in pencil – and then go to an area where they mark (with no pencil) – and mark it with a red pen / red pencil that is there for that purpose.  The answer keys are kept there.

Also – another thing she stresses is accountablilty… which includes periodically doing surprise questions with them so you can see how they are mastering the topic.  

She also says that it usually ins’t a question of “if” – but of “when” this occurs… it is almost a part of the process.  If/When this occurs – after consequences are applied, you also monitor the child closely for a while – very slowly easing up.  Children prefer being independent, and don’t like being monitored closely.  I know she discussed one of her children doing this – he (she?) was required to go back several chapters in the subject and redo it.  Apparently this likely only happens once (per child) if you deal with it properly.

I know when I was in high school, our math textbook had all the answers in the back (not how to work it out) – and we were to check our answers.  No one in my class ever cheated that I know of…. but we were an advanced class…. and the instructions from our teacher was generally “do however many questions you need to do to get the mark you want on your test”.  I could generally get 95% or more doing 3 or 4 questions.  Some of the kids would do all of them even though they would never need to.  (Mind you – one of the girls got a final mark in grade 12 advanced math (ie, calculus) of 100%.  She had 100% from the teacher, and got 100% in the departmental exam.

I’ve wandered off the topic though.   Basically, you do still need to check that the kids know what they are doing by checking periodically.

Do you mean the AO planner sheets I mentioned, or the little 6 week “race” files?

We didn’t actually use the AO files I mentioned here – but they are available on the AO forum (and the AO member schedules yahoo group) – they were called the “Master Planner”.   My kids found it too confusing, and prefered to choose their own readings.  (generally 2 a day for Year 2, 1 a day for Year 1)

We used a variety of different planner pages over the year – none of which do I have a whole year of… lol!  And I’m trying to figure out what to use next year, as I like the new grid-weekly-schedules on the AO site, so I want them to find the reading on that…   

What I’m doing to detemine the number of AO readings a day is finding the average number of readings a week, divide by 5 (or 4 for a 4 day week), then rounding up.  So Year 2 had about 8 readings a week, which would 2 readings a day either way.  I didn’t worry too much about the week starting on Monday.  This allowed for a few “off” days during the year.

I am considering doing what one mom did – she categorized the books into 3 categories based mostly on the length (using the librivox time as a guide, when available) – but difficulty would be a factor.  So they would be Hard, Medium, Easy.  On the schedule you color code them books (I wouldn’t call them Hard, Medium, etc to the kids though.)  And they need to pick from different categories.  So for Year 3 where you generally need to do 3 readings, they would need to do 1 of each (if available) each day.   This should help them leaving all the hard ones to the last day….

IF you meant the little race, PM me your email address and I can send you the files, although it isn’t too fancy…