Homeschooling Parents!!! Help!?

Question

Has your child ever gotten behind in a subject so that they have to continue it next year, even though they are supposed to be working on another level? What do you do? Will they always be behind? Should they cram? Help!

Answer 1

Don't worry about it. Keep working at your child's pace. They'll probably catch up at some stage. Everyone gets bogged down on some topics then breezes through others. Worry about whether your child is comprehending the subject matter, not whether they are at the right place in the book. Finishing the book at the right time is worth little if your child didn't understand a word of it. It won't kill them to keep doing a bit of work over the summer, either, if that's what you think needs to be done.

Answer 2

Number one reason most folks homeschool is so they can go at their own pace. I say your child is fine, maybe have them go through the summer with it.

Answer 3

It happens all the time. In formal schools and home schools. Just relax. And it will work it's way through. If your child is under 8th grade than try a site called time for learning. It really helped get my daughter caught up and learn what she didn't learn while in public school. Try going a different route than the book. Maybe it's just not letting her learn the way she naturally learns. What works for one does not always work for the others.

Answer 4

Relax! It's ok for one subject. Just pick it up next year or work on it now during the summer. Since it is just one subject you can devote more time for it and work at it longer. You might want to try that. It will help stave off the summer's I'm bored fest that is comming by August. My kids actually begged me last summer to start school a little early because they were so bored.

Answer 5

My daughter was ahead a year in most subjects so rather than stay at "grade level" she skipped a grade (on the advice of her homeschool evaluator (you have to show yearly progress in FL). The only subject she was on target with was math, so she skipped ahead and stayed a year "behind" in math. Now that she is in high school we have decided to homeschool year round with 2 weeks off in June and 2 in July so she can go to her Sea Cadet trainings. Consequently, she is doing Geometry right now. She started halfway through grade 10 and will finish halfway though grade 11. She will then take Algebra 2 and finish up right at the start of 12th grade when she will enroll in Community College to take pre cal for the first semester and hopefully calculus for the second semester. For MATH, you pretty much have to follow the sequence. This is not always that case for the other subjects. It depends on what the subject is, if college prep is in the near future, and if you need to have certain concepts down before moving on, like grammar or certain science concepts. The bottom line is that if you think your child needs the "missing information", then you can intergrate it into the next year or over the summer. If you follow a pre-packaged curriculum, you can go on to the next book and see how the child does. Then adjust accordingly.

Answer 6

Yes.  My son is dyslexic, 10, and going into 6th grade.  Before we found out he had dyslexia, he got so behind in most of his language arts subjects (like everything) that there was no hope of finishing.  He was in tears every day, the whole thing was a fight...it got to the point that I chucked the book and we just plain didn't do those subjects for a semester.

Instead, I read A LOT with him and I read up on different learning glitches, trying to figure out what the problem was.  Once I found out, I read up on everything I could find regarding dyslexia, and had a good talk with him.  I explained in as much detail as he could handle what dyslexia was, and I told him that while he did need to learn those skills, I had been teaching him in the wrong way.  We were going to try some new things, and I needed him to be honest with me about what worked and what didn't.

Two years later, he's 1-2 years above "grade level" in most language arts subjects, 3-5 years above in everything else.  I let it go for a while to give him a chance to decompress, and then we tried it in a different way.  As he started to figure out he *could* actually learn it, he started to try a bit harder and was willing to do what it took to learn the skills.  Now, he loves to come up with stories (he's looking at tackling writing a book next year) and loves to read.  His spelling, while it isn't award-winning, is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was even last year.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, yes, they do catch up.  Depending on how old the child is, it may be developmental; if your child is elementary, I'd even say let the subject go for a semester or so to let them "catch up" and let the stress go away.  If they're middle or high school, they may be using a curriculum that they either don't understand or doesn't mesh well with their learning style.

Either way, talk with them about it.  What about the subject do they not like?  What do they not understand?  If something seems impossible to them, of course they're not going to want to do it...they may not even feel like they *can* do it.  

At the end of the day, it doesn't matter so much where the scope and sequence says they should be...it matters where they *are*.  A scope and sequence is a helpful thing, but it's something that needs to be molded to your child, not the other way around.  If they're behind (and extreme laziness is not the issue), likely one of two things is to blame - either they don't understand the material the way it's presented, or it is not conducive to their learning style and they're not retaining it.  Don't make them cram - your objective is to cause them to learn the material (however that needs to happen), not to shove it into their heads and hope it sticks :)  (Although sometimes I know that seems like the only choice, I promise it isn't!)

Hope that helps!

Answer 7

The public schools don't finish the books...or pass over sections to get to the most important parts as prescribed by the people who say that students need to know certain things in certain grades.

We are relaxed eclectic in style so it is not uncommon at all for us to back up and regroup several times during the school year.   If something isn't 'working' or we find a better way to learn something, we just switch.  

If you will look at the public school books you will find that they repeat /review the same things each year in elementary school and much of the work in middle school and high school is continuation with review of elementary level work.

Answer 8

When I was in school, we rarely got more than halfway through a textbook, but we still moved on to the next level.  Some teachers jumped around, covering a few chapters here and a few there, but skipping lots in between.  And some rarely used the textbook at all, doing a lot of other stuff instead.

Textbook publishers know that this kind of stuff happens, so the first few chapters are always review of previous level's materials.  And the chapters towards the end of a textbook are usually "extra" stuff--whether they are more advanced topics that really belong in the next level, or stuff that's interesting but not really important.

Anyway, we don't always change materials based on the "school year."  Sometimes, we change to a new level in the middle of a "school year" because the kids are obviously not challenged enough by the current material.  Sometimes, we just keep going in a book, even though a new "school year" has started because we're not finished with it.  So, I'd base the decision on your child.  Does your child seem ready for new material?  (If you aren't sure, you can always try out some new material and then backtrack to the other if it turns out that the child wasn't ready yet.)  Does your child really like the current material and want to finish it?  (Then I'd stick with it.)

And no, the child won't necessarily always be behind.  You could always use a few weeks to focus on only that material in order to catch up.  Or you might find that by building a firm foundation in it now, the child will be able to zip through it later.  Or maybe that subject isn't the child's strong point and will never be.  But you can't know that at this point, you just keep tackling the subject and try to get the child to do his best work in it.