The Ultimate Homeschool Problem Solver Guide
Your Homeschool Problems: Solved.
All of our very best advice for dealing with everything from burnout and library fines to high school record-keeping and making your own curriculum.
conference shopping tip
It’s as important to know what you DON’T need as what you do.
How to Shop the Homeschool Conference
1. Do your reconnaissance.
Scan the vendor list in advance to pick out the curriculum companies you don’t want to miss — there’s a lot of stuff happening at homeschool conferences, and advance planning will ensure you get peek at everything you wanted to see. At the same time, make a list of any “black hole” subjects where you don’t have a clear plan in place — you might discover the inspiration you need. Finally, list subjects you’ve got covered and curriculum vendors you know you want to avoid. (Especially at inclusive conferences, you may find vendors selling non-secular science or history that looks cool until you get it home and realize it isn’t actually secular.) In the excitement of the sales floor, it can be easy to buy materials you don’t really need.
2. Set your limits.
Establish your total budget, as well as the maximum amount you want to spend in any area. (You may want to limit literature spending to $50 but be willing to spend up to $500 if you happen upon the perfect science curriculum.) At the same time, make a note of methods, projects, and learning styles that just don’t work for your homeschool. This reduces your risk of buying stuff that isn’t the right fit.
3. Don’t feel pressured to buy.
It’s true you can score big deals at conferences, but the big draw is the chance to check out materials in person. (Just be prepared for long lines and crowded tables.) If you decide a deal is too good to pass up, great — but don’t feel like you have to come out with a bagful of homeschool materials to count your experience a success.
How to Make Math More Homeschool-Friendly
Struggling with math? The problem may be with the way that the subject is usually taught and not with your child’s ability to understand it. Wellesley College mathematics professor Oscar Fernandez suggests that non-mathematicians often master math most effectively when they start with real world examples and gradually build up to theory, but most math classes do the opposite — echoing the way that naturally math-minded folks think but often confusing as many as 80 percent of students, says Fernandez. Using math to figure out real world problems (like the best seat at the movie theater or the fastest route to karate class) gives kids math experience that helps them make sense of more abstract theories.
curriculum tip
If you find a homeschool curriculum you love, you can use it as a jumping-off point for creating other curriculum.
How to Break Up with Your Curriculum
You put a lot of effort — and sometimes, a lot of money — into choosing the right curriculum, so it’s not always easy to let one go.
Consider your timing.
Maybe the curriculum is great — just not right now. Your child might not be academically or emotionally ready for a particular curriculum, in which case, putting it back on the shelf for a few months or years may be all you need to get the perfect fit.
Tweak the assignments.
If a curriculum has too much writing or too few hands-on activities, you can easily change some of the writing assignments to oral presentations or add a few experiments. An okay curriculum can become a great one with a few strategic tweaks. But if your tweaks end up rebuilding the curriculum from scratch, you might be better off letting that curriculum go and forging your own path.
Use it as a guide.
If you like the content a particular curriculum covers but not its methods, you can always use the syllabus as a starting point to create your own curriculum. Similarly, if you love a curriculum’s method but wish it covered different topics, you can use its methods to inspire your own curricular creations.
Recoup your loss.
If a curriculum doesn’t work, don’t let it glare at you from your schoolroom shelves. Resell it, and use the money to invest in a program that you DO love. Chances are, that not-right-for-you curriculum is perfect for another family, so you’ll be helping someone out and getting rid of a problem in one swoop.
How to Maximize Your Homeschool Budget
If you’ve got money to spend, you’ll always benefit from investing in these homeschool essentials:
1. Travel
You will never regret the money you spend on adventures with your kids. (In fact, more than 90 percent of homeschooling parents said they wished they’d made travel dollars a priority in a survey conducted by Atlanta Homeschool magazine.) And don’t be afraid to think bigger: Set aside that $2,000 you’d spend on a trip to Disney and use it as a starter fund for a trip to Europe.
2. Technology
“Our computers are by far the things we use the most in our house,” says unschooling mom Tama McGee. “We use them for research, games, email, Skype with friends and family, typing stories, doing puz- zles—the list never ends.”
3. Art supplies
The better your supplies, the more fun it is to make art. With sales, coupons, and smart shopping, you can afford to invest in your child’s creativity.
How to Beat a Bad Homeschool Day Before It Even Starts
On a good day, when you’re feeling energized and excited about homeschool life, write a message to yourself to read next time you’re having a bad day. Think about the words you need to hear when a math lesson ends in tears or you snap at your toddler for making a mess of the science center. Pull it out when you need to as a reminder that you’re doing the right thing even when things don’t go just right.
homeschooling high school tip
If you prep for the most rigorous college on your “possible college plans” list, you’ll know your transcript contains everything it needs.
How to Survive Homeschooling High School
To survive high school as a homeschooler, you’ll cut your stress significantly if you start by thinking about the end game. Figure out what the academic requirements at three of the colleges your student might be interested in are (obviously your child’s interests may change between 8th grade and application time, and that’s fine), and zero in on the most stringent list. How many history credits do applicants need? How much foreign language? Then use the information you’ve culled to piece together a four-year outline for high school that includes all the essentials. You’ll have a few blank places and a few options for some classes (like English or history), but don’t worry about completely filling the schedule. You don’t need to know what you’re going to use for each of these subjects, but planning this way helps ensure that you cover the bases while still leaving room for your child to pursue her passions.
Next, you’ll want to come up with a system to track your child’s high school career. (We like the envelope system we recommend below, but there are online databases, old-fashioned checklists, and even companies that do all of the tracking for you, so choose the method that best suits your organization style.)
You will have to be organized about keeping track of classes, credits, and book lists if you don’t want a last-minute graduation panic, so enlist your student’s assistance. After all, this is her future, right? Plan quarterly or annual meetings to compare notes and go over your records together and to make adjustments to your plan. (Maybe she’s decided to study computer programming instead of history and needs to add more math classes, or she’s aiming to go into classics and wants to add Greek to her foreign language studies.) If you track on a computer, back up your files or print them out regularly so that if you have a technology meltdown, you don’t lose four years of records and your last remaining shreds of sanity.
It may seem smart to ease into high school, but it’s best to carry a full load in 9th and 10th grade, says homeschooling mom Elizabeth Ackley, who has sent two homeschoolers to college and has a junior in high school still at home.
“By the time you get to junior and senior year, you’ll have internships, college classes, and other activities that take up a lot of time, so you don’t want to have to catch up with geography or first year French then,” she says.
Also, let go of the notion that you will ever teach your child everything you want him to learn him to in high school. You’ll make yourself crazy thinking that you have to teach your child everything he needs to go to college or out into the world. Trust your good work, and give your student the space to learn some things on his own.
When application season rolls around, Ackley recommends putting your student in charge. “Let her figure out the deadlines and what she needs,” she says. “If she’s not responsible enough to handle applying to college, she may not be responsible enough to go to college yet. Taking a year off never hurt anybody,” she adds.
curriculum writing tip
Make plenty of room for the fun stuff up front — that’s the learning your kids will be most likely to remember.
How to Write Your Own Curriculum
It’s easier and less stressful than you might think. Really.
Once you’ve been homeschooling a while, you realize something. However excitingly irresistible a curriculum seems when you’re researching it, by the second week of using it, you’re itching to tweak it. Maybe it’s little tweaks, like subbing one science experiment for another one or adding books to the recommended reading. Often, though, it’s big changes you’re making: Slowing down and adding more information to focus more closely on one topic, skipping a subject that you’ve already covered in depth, cutting this and adding that until your curriculum feels like the right fit.
One of the biggest complaints about public school education standards is the notion that any packaged curriculum can be one-size-fits-all, but it’s easy to feel intimidated by the notion of eschewing professionally produced curriculum for a DIY version. Don’t you have to be an expert or a great writer or a professional educator to write a curriculum? Of course you don’t.
It’s time that we stop thinking of the perfect curriculum as some Holy Grail that we’ll eternally seek and never find. Shift gears: Stop being Indiana Jones, and channel your inner Frank Lloyd Wright instead. Think of making your own curriculum as making a master plan. You’re not an expert in your subject? That’s a perfect starting point to learn more about it. You’re not a great writer? Well, fine — you’re not writing a script. You’re making a tool, one that will combine different resources and ideas into a personalized study program.
THE BIG PICTURE
Your first job is to hone in on what you really want your homeschool — not your curriculum — to accomplish.
If you’ve never made a homeschool mission statement, here’s your chance. (If you have a homeschool mission statement, revisit it to make sure it still reflects your homeschool’s spirit and goals.) Get creative: You can jot down words and ideas, but you can also make a Pinterest board, a collage, or even a series of drawings. Don’t worry about being super-realistic: Dreaming is allowed. (If you’re stuck, think about that future day when your homeschooler is graduated. What do you want him to look back and think about his homeschooling experience? What will he have accomplished through his years of home education?) You need a clear vision of where you want to go before you start drawing a map to get you there.
At the same time, work on a one- or two-sentence description of your student’s learning style. What work does your student enjoy? Is she a reader or a doer? An experiencer or an analyzer?
You’ll use these two things — a vision for your homeschool and an understanding of your student’s learning style — to craft your curriculum. Constantly ask yourself: Does this mesh with our homeschool goals? Will my student be inspired by this? When the answer is yes, you know you’ve got a keeper.
While you’re at it, start a list of “Absolutely Nots.” Here’s where you can make note of the things that just plain don’t work in your homeschool, whether that means workbooks or narrations. As you dive into planning, it’s easy to get excited about ideas or resources that just don’t work with your real life homeschooling style. This list will help you avoid those things.
NAME YOUR TOPIC
Now you’ll direct your focus at the topic you want your curriculum to tackle. Maybe you’re determined to cook up an animal studies curriculum or you’re yearning for a good U.S. history program. Take a little while to consider what you want your curriculum to achieve. Are you interested in a broad introduction? Is mastery your goal? Do you want to work with big themes or specific chronologies? Use your homeschool goals and student learning style to guide you as you narrow your focus: Your student who loves knowing about the people behind historic events may be inspired by an art history curriculum that focuses on the lives and works of great artists, while a hands-on, creative kid may respond better to a curriculum that focuses on techniques and allows them to experiment with the styles of great artists. Both approaches will teach art history, but the The People Who Shaped Art History and Art History Lab are very different classes. Naming your class will help you zoom in on its focus, which will make weeding through all the available information a lot more efficient.
BIG PICTURE SCHEDULE
Along the same lines, breaking down how much time you want to devote to your curriculum on a weekly basis will help you get organized. If you want to spend five hours a week on the History of the American West, you can dig a lot deeper and include more rabbit trails than you can if you want to limit your study to an hour a week. Be honest as you consider how much time you want to spend on a given topic: If you’re dedicating an hour of poetry time a week, you can’t feasibly choose twenty different poetic styles and fifty different poets to talk about. You’re going to have to tighten up your focus and aim to simplify your list to include the very best examples. Be as pragmatic as possible: If you know you have a busy schedule of activities, don’t just tell yourself you’ll make time somehow. Work with the time that you really have, and you’ll be a lot more successful.
Think about the kind of work you want your student to do: Weekly readings and narrations? Book reports? Journaling? A weekly art project? Labs? There’s no right or wrong answer, as long as you’re meshing your goals with your child’s learning style, but you may want to scan one of the “What Your X- Grader Needs to Know” lists to see if there’s any kind of academic milestone — like writing a research paper or doing a science project — that might be a good fit for your curriculum.
BREAK IT DOWN
Here’s where the work most people think of as curriculum planning begins. Look at as many existing curricula in your topic area as you can: Check online for freebies, search your bookshelves, borrow copies from friends, scour textbook tables of contents. Keep a notebook, a Pinterest board, or a master document on your computer where you can make lists of things like topics covered, reading lists, organization, projects and activities, special tools or equipment, and anything else that feels relevant to your project.
Your task here is to break the course you described in Step Two down into its component parts. Say you’re putting together a curriculum about Big Issues in Philosophy. You may decide that truth, beauty, love, and goodness are the big issues you want to tackle. If you’re working on a grammar curriculum for your elementary student, you may break it down into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, sentences, and punctuation. If your smaller subjects are still pretty big, you’ll want to break them down into smaller sections, too. So, for instance, you might break your punctuation section down into periods, exclamation points, question marks, and commas. As you work, you may go back to the drawing board to start over a few times, but eventually, you’ll start to see an outline for your subject emerge.
THE FUN STUFF
Before you jump into scheduling reading and projects, take a few minutes to consider the fun in your curriculum. Look around for field trip opportunities. Consider putting together a soundtrack to go with your class — songs inspired by poetry for a poetry curriculum, or a chronological journey through American musical history for American history. Rustle up movies and documentaries to support your studies. These extras are often the things that make the biggest impression on your students, so make room for them from the beginning instead of trying to squeeze them in as you go along.
COMPILE YOUR RESOURCES
Now, you’ll make a list of all the materials you want to include in your class — the books, websites, and other things your student will use to explore this subject. Go ahead and make a ridiculously big list — you know you want to! Include any book, workbook, or activity that you think you might possibly want to use. Though it seems counter-intuitive, knowing that you’ve really done a thorough job of listing all your resource options will make it easier to narrow it down to the dozen or so resources you can actually use.
Once you’ve made your list, start trimming. You don’t need ten books on cells for a life science class, so you’ll want to weigh titles against each other to choose the one that’s really the best. As you do this, something kind of cool will start to happen: You’ll become an expert — you’ll feel good about the choices you’re making, the resources you’re choosing and the ones you’re leaving out, because you’ll have a real sense of your subject and the available materials. You may make copies of chapters from different books, taking a section from this title and a timeline from that one, and clip them together into a book for your class. Or you may just want to make notes to yourself about what you’re reading and why.
PUT IT TOGETHER
Here’s where the outline you made back in Step Four achieves its destiny. Fill in your topic breakdown outline with your resources. Jot the fun activities and resources you’ll be using to cover each topic beside the topic name. (Include relevant page numbers, or you’ll end up doing a lot of frustrating page-flipping.) You may find you’ve left a topic without a good resource. If that happens, head back to your resource list to fill in the blank. Or you may find that despite your best resource trim- ming, your plan is heavy in a particular topic and you have to winnow down your materials a little more. When you’ve finished, check your plan against your resource list and your fun stuff list — did you leave out any- thing really fabulous that you really wanted to include? Are you excited about each topic? Go back and fiddle with each section until it feels just right.
ASSESS AND ADAPT
Remember: Your curriculum isn’t set in stone. If it feels like you need to change something, add something, or drop something, do it. You’re the expert.
How to Tell How You’re Doing Without Grades
Without tests and report cards, how can you tell if your child is making educational progress? Happily, evaluating outside the test bubble actually gives you a better measure of how much your child is learning since you can weigh his success using a variety of methods.
Trust yourself.
If your child clearly seems to be zipping ahead in science, he’s probably zipping ahead in science. If you feel like your child is struggling with reading, he’s probably having trouble with reading. Your experiences teaching your child are some of the best indicators of his learning that you have.
Keep a portfolio.
Stash a few of your child’s pieces of work in a folder every week, and pull the folder out every six months or so. You’ll be able to see his progress right in front of you, making it clear where your child is excelling and where he might need extra help.
Ask your student.
Kids often know what subjects they feel intimidated by, even if their work on paper sug- gests otherwise. Talk to your student about how he’s doing, and let his input guide your thinking.
Keep a checklist.
Books like the What Your X-Grader Should Know series break down skills and knowledge by grade, so it’s easy to pinpoint what your child should be mastering each year.
Take a standardized test.
If your child doesn’t get stressed out by testing and you use the test as only one factor in your overall evaluation, a standardized test can be a helpful measurement tool.
How to Deal with Homeschool Conflicts with Your Kids
Homeschooling can test your parenting skills like nothing else, and there will be days when you hit serious relationship turbulence with your kid. The most important thing to remember during these admittedly trying times is that they pass — next week, this math-fueled shouting match will be a distant memory, and you’ll both be back to your regularly scheduled homeschool groove. In the meantime, these functional strategies can help pave the way for fewer future conflicts:
Don’t be a fake.
If your daughter’s study habits drive you crazy or you can’t stand the way your son walks into walls because he has his nose in a book, speak up. Your goal here isn’t to try to change your child, simply to express how you feel. Keeping annoyances bottled up robs you and your child of the opportunity to learn how to disagree productively, explains Carolyn Cowan, a family researcher at the University of California at Berkeley.
Do be narrative-aware.
The way we talk about our homeschool lives can have a significant impact on how we feel about them. Complain about grumpy kids, impossible assignments, and sloppy work? Aer a while, those things might be all you see. Focusing your conversation on the positive can help you see the good stuff more clearly.
Be the change you want to see in your homeschool.
If you’re unhappy with your homeschool life, do something about it. Sure, you can try to change your child, but it’s a whole lot easier — and ultimately more beneficial — to change yourself. Unless your child’s behavior is clearly harmful, turn your correcting eye inward: Why do you respond to him this way? What could you do differently?
How to Hire a Homeschool Tutor
Start with recommendations from other homeschoolers.
Teaching a homeschooler can be radically different from teaching a student in traditional school.
Interview a few.
Not only will you increase your pool of options, you’ll also get a mini-education in your child’s chosen subject as you chat about resources and methods.
Define your goals.
Knowing what you want your child’s tutor to provide — a basic intro to chemistry, mastery of Spanish grammar, or the skills to knit a sweater, for instance — will help you pinpoint the right tutor for your teen.
Focus on your subject.
If your teen wants to do a novel study of Jane Austen, you want a tutor who’s spent time studying Austen. Help your teen hone in on some of the specifics on his learning wish list so you can address those topics with potential tutors.
Get references.
Talking to other people a tutor has worked with will give you an idea of her teaching strong points. If you can, let your teen talk with other students a tutor has worked with so she can ask her own questions.
Take a trial run.
One tutoring session is often all you need to tell whether a particular tutor is a good fit.
How to Socialize Your Homeschooled Child
Really, this is going to be the easiest thing you do as a homeschooler. (The hardest thing may be not sighing loudly when non-homeschoolers ask you about socialization.) Go to homeschool events, play at park days, talk to families at co-op, plan a few playdates, go grocery shopping, do volunteer work, take a class — trust us, your child will be socialized.
homeschool tip
Check in with yourself and your kids frequently to make sure homeschooling is still the right path for your family.
How to Tell When It’s Time to Stop Homeschooling
Homeschool burnout can be hard to talk about, but it happens to almost every homeschooling parent at one time or another. It often strikes in midwinter, when post-holiday blahs and cabin fever collide with the January blues to make homeschooling a chore rather than a pleasure. These are the days when you feel like homeschooling was a massive mistake, you are a terrible teacher, and your children are going to grow up to be unhappy, uneducated adults because you have failed them utterly — which would bother you more if they weren’t grating on your last nerve.
Homeschooling is hard work — and smart homeschoolers pause occasion- ally to make sure that home-based education is still a good fit for their families. If you’re questioning whether your homeschool funk is a temporary setback or a sign that it’s time to make a change, ask yourself these questions:
What would make homeschooling happy again?
If the answer is something straightforward — like trimming your schedule so you do less running around, making more time for field trips, or saying goodbye to a not-a-great-fit curriculum — just making the change might be enough to put things back on the right track. More complicated answers may also have easy solutions: If chaotic mornings make you feel like a nag, consider pushing back your daily start time, or if you’re butting heads with your child over a difficult subject, outsourcing that class to a tutor or co-op could put the fun back in your homeschool. Still not sure? Pretend you have an infinite budget and infinite time for homeschooling. What would you do with those resources? If time and money aren’t the problem, you may have deeper issues.
How is your homeschooling making a difference for your child?
Homeschooling without a strong sense of purpose is like cleaning the bathroom: You know you have to do it every day, but it’s never going to be something you get excited about. Working hard without feeling like you’re making an impact is demoralizing, but a little perspective can help you give yourself the credit you deserve. Not convinced? Think about the other benefits of homeschool life — stronger family ties, a more relaxed schedule, lifetime learning — and try to see your homeschooling as a means of achieving those goals. If you genuinely feel that your homeschool efforts aren’t making the least bit of difference, it may be time to make a change.
What are you learning?
Of all the problems you can run into as a homeschooling parent, feeling like you’re mentally stagnating can be one of the most insidious. Lots of homeschooling parents appreciate the heady thrill of learning new stuff right along with their kids, but what happens when you’re not learning anything new? Being bored is, well, boring. It could be that all you need is a perspective shift — if you view learning as a mutual endeavor rather than as a project that you have to facilitate, you may be surprised by how much you can learn. But if you’re genuinely at a mental impasse, you definitely need a homeschooling break.
How would life be different if you stopped homeschooling?
Think about the prospect of letting go of your homeschool days for a while. Does the prospect inspire you with possibility — maybe there’s a project of your own you’ve been yearning to pursue or you can see your daughter blooming in an environment where she gets to spend time with her friends every day. If the thought of letting go of homeschool for a while lights you up inside, you may want to seriously consider taking a break. If, on the other hand, the idea of not homeschooling feels like a mistake or a great loss, it’s worth seriously considering ways to improve your everyday homeschool experience.
If these questions don’t point you in a clear direction, take two weeks off. Your feeling when those two weeks are up — quiet dread or recharged enthusiasm — will reveal your attitude toward homeschooling. The truth is, there is no absolute right answer to the question of whether you should stop homeschooling your child. Only you can find the answer, and it may be an answer that changes from year to year. If you do decide quitting homeschooling is the right step for your family right now, don’t let that decision make you feel like a failure. Homeschool works so well because you can tailor it to your child’s specific needs — and sometimes those specific needs may warrant being educated outside the home.
homeschool organization tip
If you didn’t start out keeping records, don’t stress! Start now, and go back and fill in the gaps as you can.
How to Keep Homeschool Records, a.k.a. The Easiest Homeschool Organization System Ever
The envelope solution is elegant, effective, and so simple you can’t screw it up. Start it in 9th grade — 8th if you’re feeling particularly ambitious — and when it’s time to start the college application process, you’ll be all set.
Label a large envelope for each class with the full name of the course and grade number (9-Honors English 1 or 11-AP U.S. History). Add an envelope for extracurricular activities — if your child is serious about an activity, like soccer or theater, you may want to create a separate envelope for that as well as one for general extracurricular activities. Label another envelope with your teen’s grade level and Honors — you’ll stash certificates of achievement, pictures of science fair experiments, and other awards and recognitions here. Add one last envelope for community service — again, be sure to label it with your student’s grade level.
Make a basic information sheet for each class. Include:
the textbook(s) used, with ISBN numbera copy of the textbook’s table of contents (Do this now. The last thing you want to do is end up rooting through boxes in the garage in a couple of years to figure out if your son’s freshman biology class included a section on genetics.)
the course description and syllabus the name of the teacher (yes, even if it’s you)
the number of credit hours the course entails
Tuck this information sheet securely in the envelope. Add items to envelope as the year progresses. Things you’ll want to include:
graded papers and tests
samples of presentations, lab re- ports, or other work done in the class
a running reading list (Add titles of books and essays to the list as you read them so you don’t have to try to remember everything at the end of the year. Even better, have your student keep an annotated reading list — with notes about each book.)
notes about associated activities — visits to museums, lectures, theaters, etc. — that relate to the class
At the end of the class, write the final grade and total credit hours on the front of the envelope. Add:
official grades — community college report cards, printouts from an online class, or your evaluations
Ask any outside teachers to write a recommendation letter for your student. Do it now while your student’s work is still fresh in their minds, and add the recommendation to your envelope. If you decide to ask this teacher for a recommendation when you’re working on college applications, you can give him his original recommendation to refresh his memory.
If your student ends up taking an AP or CLEP exam in a subject, add the exam results to your envelope. Similarly, if your student publishes or wins an award for work she started in the class, add those credits to your envelope.
Use a binder clip to group your envelopes — depending on how your brain works, you may want them grouped by grade level, by subject matter, or by some other criteria. However you group them, they’ll make writing that final transcript a lot easier since all your information will be organized in one place.
How to Deal with Homeschool Mom Anxiety
1. If you’re worried about something specific — your child’s math skills or standardized test scores — the best thing you can do is to enlist a little help. Look for a teaching workshop or conference in the area you’re struggling with, or consider hiring a tutor or signing your child up for classes in the subject so that you can take a break from teaching it. This isn’t giving up: It’s using your resources wisely.
2. Schedule your days to emphasize problem areas. If your child is really struggling with fractions, change your daily math class to a cooking class so she can do some hands-on fractions work. If you’re worried about your child learning the states in the United States or the capitals of countries around the world, pick up a geography puzzle or game and make it a part of your daily routine for a while.
3. If your anxiety is more general, look for ways to relax, such as meditation, a walk, yoga class, or a solo cup of tea. You may also want to start a journal of good homeschool moments to flip back through during crisis moments to see that (at least sometimes) you really do know what you are doing. Joining a homeschool group where you can chat with other moms — many of whom have the same worries you do — can also help.
How to Skip Tests and Still Encourage Deep Learning
Want your students to really grasp a subject? Skip the tests, and let them lead them teach you the material instead. Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis found that students who expected to teach material to another student had better recall and more sophisticated understanding of their subject than those who just expected to take a test. Instead of just trying to memorize information, students who expect to teach seek out key points and organize information into a coherent structure.
How to Stop Losing Library Books
If you’re racking up library fines left and right, getting organized can save you big bucks in the future. Set up a library station inside your house, where you can store your library booty and post the list of checked out materials every week. When kids want to grab a book or CD, ask them to sign it out, the same way they do at the library, then sign it back in when they return it. Not only does this boost library responsibility — kids and parents are more likely to keep up with books when they have to sign them out — it also makes it easy to track down lost books since you have a record of who had them last.
