Keeping Track of work

Whilst here in the UK, there is no requirement to keep records of student work when you are home educating. I like to keep track of what we have done, it also allows the children to see their own progress in action as it were. In order to do this I use two forms, one is my termly checklist, which I downloaded and adapted from Charlotte Mason help, and the other is a variation of a checklist that I saw on line somewhere.

The termly checklist is just that, it has each subject that I teach broken down by day over a 12 week term.  See image below:

I cannot offer you a copy of this as it is not my work but you can find them here by joining the yahoo group. CHARLOTTE MASON HELP YAHOO GROUP


The other tool that I use to keep organised is the children's checklist. I print this out at the beginning of the week and keep it in a plastic page cover which goes in their morning work folder. I put it in here as I did not know where else to put it. The whole weeks lessons fit onto one page and included a section for comments. But here is the best bit, each day includes a list of the lessons and what we do, with a column for 'done' and 'grade'.  For some reason Nuh is really into ticking things off, so he likes this bit and it gives him accountability which is good. The grade column is not used to record traditional grades like 'A' and 'B' as I think Nuh is way too young for this, but is used for our own grading system:

• E= Excellent 
• S= Satisfactory
• N= Needs work

Notice that I did not use 'unsatisfactory' I hate this term, I used to see how it crushed colleagues at work when I was a teacher when they received an 'unsatisfactory' for an observation. Imagine how crushing for a child. Needs work, is much more constructive.
Each 'E' on the weeks checklist receives a reward. We just add them up and give some money for every 'E'.

You can get an editable copy of the checklist here, by clicking on the text underneath the image:

STUDENT CHECKLIST

Narration, Narration

I think when I first started reading about CM one of the concepts that made inherent sense to me was 'Narration'. I just seems so logically, if the child can tell you back in their own words what you have just read then they have retained the information. Ergo, learning completed. However as I am sure many of you have experienced when trying to implement this wonderful technique in your home school, its easier said than done. When I first started it with Nuh, I explained to him what I wanted him to do and we started out with telling back every couple of sentences worth of reading. Then built on that, however I think that I was too demanding too exacting and some how this became a massive chore, and not some laid back wonderful mystical learning experience.

I started to dread it and so did Nuh, this was disastrous as most of the learning in CM requires narration, right? Whilst technically the answer is yes, if you read around on the web, there are many ways to accomplish this task apart from the 'you must insist on perfect attention' advice. From my forays into web land I learnt that I needed to relax, I also remembered that discussion is a valid tool in learning and so I decided that I wanted narration to be more of a discussion, so what if I am providing some of the information surely that shows that I am an interested participant in the learning and that this is something that is not being done to him. I also liked the idea of using note booking as copy work, so this is what we do.


So this is how we do narration, I read the chapter. This is not a continuous reading, I read approximately a paragraph then me and Nuh discuss what I have just read, either I will ask him to tell me something about what I have just read or what can he remember, we will then discuss it, especially if it was something interesting. In order to demonstrate this process, I will write about the most recent narration that we did for CHOW, chapter 24  , this chapter is about the Persia vs Greece.

the first few chapters deal with what the word versus means, which Nuh knows already so I am not going to ask him to narrate that, the next few paragraphs detail information about the Persian King Darius and how he wanted to conquer Greece, so he sent his son in law to conquer it. This is how the narration went:

Me: "Wow that King was really mad"
Nuh: "Yeah, he was, lets find Greece on the map"
Me: "OK, here it is"
Nuh: "Where was Persia" ( I pointed it out on the map)
Nuh: "So Persia was really big and it wanted to add Greece to its empire (I supplied, the word empire)
Me: "yes, that what empires do, they always want to expand, can you remember the Kings name?"
Nuh: "Darius, why was he mad at the weather?"
Me: "Because it wrecked his fleet, and he couldn't then conquer Greece"

Even though we sort of got off topic, Nuh always wants to know where these countries are on the map, so I point them out. (its so useful having the world map permanently on the table under a see through cover) We then got back on topic and discussed the salient points. I supplied one of the answers, which is natural in a discussion.

The next few paragraphs explain that Darius sent messengers to all the Greek cities asking them to send him some water and soil as a sign that they would surrender peacefully. Most did except Athens and Sparta, who decided to join together to fight him. Our narration is below:

Nuh: "where is Athens and Sparta" ( i point them out on the map) "Wow they are really small, they will never win against Persia"
Me: "they must have been brave to ignore King Darius and not send the stuff"
Nuh: "Why did he want earth and water?, its funny that they threw the messenger in the well" ( I explain the significance of the earth and water"
Me: "would you have sent the earth and water"
Nuh: "yeah, Persia is massive, its army must be massive, in minecraft you have zombie armies".
Me: "That's interesting but we are not talking about minecraft, lets focus"

I know its time to read the next chapter now, if he is trying to talk about minecraft. Nice try son, nice try.

The next few paragraphs outline how the Persian army was transported by Trireme's and how many soldiers they were. there are two really important points in this chapter to remember one, the number of soldiers and two, how many miles marathon is from Athens.

Me: "lets look at a trireme on the Internet"
Nuh: "okay, wow they must have being really squashed in. 120,000 soldiers is a lot" (nuh is good with numbers)
Me: "They landed a long way from Athens, can you remember how far"
Nuh: "26 miles".

Nuh definitely needs to know where things are on the map and have a clear image of things in his head. the next paragraphs of the chapter carry on like this, in a discussion format with me supplying some of the information and prompting him sometimes. The last narration always involves some kind of summary in discussion format.

Ancient Babylon: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon

As you probably know Ancient Babylon crops up a few times in the history time line. This post is about the chapter from CHOW that relates to the creation of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Again this post is a retrospective post as we actually completed this activity quite some time ago.

As with all of our history studies we started out by my reading the chapter from CHOW. We then discussed what we had read, as I mentioned in an earlier post I do not read the whole chapter from beginning to end then ask him to narrate it back. I read approximately a paragraph then ask him to tell me something that interested him from the reading, we then discuss this. When we have finished reading the chapter we then do some copy work. I ask Nuh to tell me which was his favourite part of the chapter. This week he chose the part about King Nebuchadnezzar going mad.  I copied this out onto our note booking paper, I pointed out the grammar, then had him copy it out.

Sometimes he does not want to draw a picture to go with the copy work which I do not mind as we usually do a craft to go with the chapter. I know that doing craft is not strictly CM, but hey I am home educating I can do what I want. Anyway the craft helps to solidify the information. Today we are making, that's right you guessed it the 'Hanging Gardens of Babylon'.
This craft will take more than one day to complete, which I am totally cool with. We used cereal boxes, paper cups and tissue boxes, glued them together with my glue gun and then glued tissue paper over the boxes, this will allow us to paint over the boxes without the writing showing through. When this was dry we then painted it and orange/brown colour. When the paint was dry we then painted on the arch ways, and went into the garden to collect some plant material to glue onto the garden, I used my glue gun for this.

This is our finished product, the kids were really pleased with how it turned out, me too... I always let Zuh take part in our craft projects even if she has no idea what we are doing.


p.s yes that is a log on the carpet in the background.lol