Starting Out
Preparing for Your Year, part 1 – The Curriculum
Homeschooling is a big job. Choosing curriculum and programs for our students can be exciting but can also become overwhelming very quickly. Add to that the learning curve required to understand all the ins and outs of the workings of a charter school and suddenly getting started on your year can be daunting indeed. It is our sincere desire to help you, the Learning Coach (parent/guardian), feel confident in this worthwhile journey.
In this first article, we will guide you through a few simple steps to approach planning out your year. A school year has about 36 weeks (or 180 days). So, how many days a week should you do math? What science should you cover? How do you fit in field trips? How do you know if you’ve chosen too much?
I am the homeschool mom that wants to do “all the things.” My desire for well-educated and well-rounded kids leads to a long list of subjects to cover. After many years of schooling, I am finally accepting that I don’t have to do it all in one year. If you have this tendency, you might find it helpful to think hard about your goals. What are you working towards? Then, perhaps map out the next few years to see how some of those subjects and experiences can be spread out.
It’s very important that you have a plan to cover
Math
Social Studies/History
Science
Language Arts (including Reading/Phonics, Writing, Grammar)
Subjects to consider adding to these are
Handwriting/Typing
Music (perhaps an instrument and Music Appreciation)
Art (learning techniques as well as Art Appreciation)
Physical Education
Coding or robotics
Foreign Language
When you’ve narrowed down what you will cover this school year, it’s time to sit down with a calendar. Take some time to consider the interruptions (aka “life”) throughout the year. Will you do a regular school day on birthdays, or close the math book for a field trip? What about holidays? Some families like to do themed lessons (unit studies) for a week or two before a specific holiday. Do you want to make sure to choose special read-alouds or picture books to teach your children about Martin Luther King Jr. as his day approaches? How about visiting a fish hatchery at the beginning of salmon spawning season?
As you’re looking at the calendar, consider the best way to break up your year. By month? Quarter? Learning Period? Looking at the year in smaller chunks can help you pace your curriculum, or if you get off track, it can be a new starting point to get you going again.
Unit studies are something to consider here. I love learning about art and classical music with my kids. It’s something we can all do together across grade levels. As I’m planning my year, I often consider focusing on a time period or style or a specific artist or composer for a section of our year. I can get books from the library, examples to study, and if I am really ambitious, an activity or video to go along with. Maybe you want to do unit studies on life skills for older kids—6 different topics for six weeks, like typing, health, cooking, budgeting, car maintenance—get creative! You can cover a lot of ground without doing it all at once.
Make a plan for your year that will work for you and your family. Do you need every day planned? Go for it. Like me, do you need a schedule written down so that you can get started before the coffee kicks in? Great! I always make a schedule or plan so that I can get going, but then deviate from it as I go. Having made the schedule in the first place, I know what needs to be done and can feel free to mix it up without throwing us off track. Maybe you like to wake up and see which way the wind is blowing. Consider making a checklist for the year or week of the skills, knowledge and standards you want and need to cover this year. Every month or so, you can make sure you’re making meaningful progress.
One hint to make your year flow more smoothly is to consider the school calendar as you plan. You can find the calendar here. Your teacher will let you know which samples are due each month. We’ll talk more about samples in another article but trust me when I tell you that your year will flow more smoothly if you anticipate the necessary samples, rather than trying to play catch-up every Learning Period. You can find the I Can statements (State standards for each grade) here. This can help guide what you choose for your samples.
Now it’s time to take a look at your curriculum. Some curriculum comes already paced—180 lessons (do 1 lesson a day) or a certain number of weeks (usually 30-36). If so, that’s paced for you. But some don’t provide that pacing. In that case it’s often helpful to gauge how much you’d need to get done each day or week to stay on track. I will be using Math Mammoth for my 3rd grader this year. It comes in two books, so I know that finishing the first book by the end of the first semester is the goal. I can divide it up from there. For my junior high girls, we do Easy Grammar. I decided that trying to figure out how many lessons were in that slightly unwieldy book wasn’t worth my time, but doing 5-6 pages a week would be a good goal. On the other hand, they do BookShark for language arts, and that’s planned out for 4 days a week over 36 weeks. I don’t have to do much for that! Spend time looking through the curriculum you choose to get familiar with how to pace it out. Many websites will give you enough information online to be able to plan that out even if you are still waiting to order.
So now the hot topic—When will you get your curriculum and what if it hasn’t arrived in time? I know many of you are wondering and worrying about this. The fact is, many of you will have your curriculum trickle in over the first month or so of school. While this is disappointing initially, it doesn’t have to be a problem. If you think ahead and get creative, you can make this part of your plan. Children aren’t dependent upon a certain book or program to begin learning. They are learning every day. You can direct and enhance that in all kinds of creative ways. Feel free to start with some of those unit studies I mentioned. Brainstorm and think creatively, and the first month of school can be a lot of fun, rather than just a holding pattern, waiting for the UPS guy. The Family Liaison team has been brainstorming lots of ideas to help you with this. We will be coming out with a long list of great ideas for you soon. You may end up enjoying some of them so much, you won’t miss your curriculum!
We are here to help. Please reach out and let us know if you have concerns or need assistance. Do you have other ideas for those first few weeks? Share them with us!
Don’t forget that the purpose of planning out your year is to bring peace and calm to your homeschooling experience. Enjoy your kids! Have adventures together! Spend the time YOU need to plan out school in a way that will give you the freedom to relax into this journey.
Preparing for Your Year, part 2 – Your Home
You’ve researched curriculum and made decisions. When the Online Purchasing System opens, you are ready to place your orders! You’ve made a list of the school supplies you need, and you’ve got some good ideas for field trips. You sat down with a calendar and got a good overview of your school year, like I suggested, right? (See Part 1 below) You’re ready!
Well, wait. You want this school year to go as smoothly as possible. You want your family to thrive and enjoy it. The right math book and enough pencils aren’t the only ingredients in that. In this article, we’re going to look at how to prepare yourself, your home, and your family for a smooth year of school. If you haven’t given this much thought yet, please read on. You can’t ignore the “home” in “homeschool.” It counts for so much!
The first person to consider in this part of the preparation is yourself. You are the engine in this vehicle. If you don’t acknowledge how you run, you are going to struggle all year. While you probably think that school is all about your kids, it’s not. You are an integral part, and if you try to run it contrary to your own personality, everybody will crash and burn. If you thrive on schedule and orderliness but school is off-the-cuff chaos, you will burn out. On the flip side, if you chaff against routine, you’d be wise to schedule in “interruptions,” with well-timed breaks for field trips or out-of-the-box activities. By its nature, certain parts of school need routine, but you can keep yourself from burning out in January if you work with your personality and find the areas that can give you space to breathe. Decide ahead of time how much chaos you are willing to endure. Do you need to find time for prep or checking over work? Consider that in your week, so you don’t always feel behind.
Next, you would be wise to spend some time considering your goals. You might want to sit down with your partner over a cup of coffee and talk over these questions:
What are you working towards? Do you want to make sure your kids are prepared for college if they choose that route? Trade school?
What life skills do you want to make sure they have when they are done with school?
What character traits are important for them to demonstrate?
Remember, we are not simply educating our children by replacing the brick-and-mortar school. We are raising our kids while we teach them about the world around them and prepare them for adulthood.
Once you have considered how you yourself function best and you’ve established the goals your family is working toward, ask yourself, “What do I want our school to look like?” Are we going to read on the couch and do math on the floor and be outside as much as possible? Is the kitchen table a great place (or the only place) to sit to do work? Does your family need a designated spot to work or gather materials? Do you function best with a formal or informal style? Do you expect your kids to learn to work quietly and independently? Do you want to be involved in their work? Envision your day-to-day routine or activities and think through what you’d need to set up to make that happen.
As you think that through, give some thought to what habits you could establish to help your day run smoothly. Are there morning chores that need to be accomplished? Maybe it would help your kids to have a list posted or an email sent that they can reference as they get up and get moving. Do you want to make sure school books are put away as you switch subjects or activities? Plan to spend some time focusing on that for the first couple of weeks until it becomes automatic.
In addition to the habits you want to establish, decide whether or not you want to use some sort of motivational system. Some parents find this very helpful, some think it’s too much like “school.” What would be best for your family? My kids wear green plastic bracelets when everything is going smoothly. If they need a reminder to get focused or cooperate, I trade them for a yellow. If that’s enough of a warning to get them back on track, I give them back the green a bit later. It usually is enough. Every once in a while, the yellow is traded for a red, and a consequence is necessary. But a green bracelet at the end of the day will earn them a ticket towards a prize down the road, so they are motivated. This system gives my kids gentle reminders and prevents me from feeling like I have to spend a lot of time on minor behavioral issues. Trade bracelets, move on. Every day is a fresh day with a green bracelet and we try again!
Don’t forget to spend a little time to consider how the various systems in your home will run while you are schooling your kids. Do you need to plan and prep meals over the weekend? When and who will make sure the laundry gets done? How will you fit in cleaning? Gardening? Think through your family, your home, and realize that school takes up time and a lot of space in your brain. If your home is falling apart, it’s difficult to maintain peace and enjoyment in school. As your children get older, the workload can be shared and home economics classes like culinary arts or small engine repair can be incorporated into the school year.
The final area of your home to take a look at can be a touchy one. I want to encourage you to consider the methods and habits you and your children have regarding their behavior. If you take a hard look at your communication with them and realize that they ignore you more than they listen to you, that the absence of respect is making it hard to get even small things done, then I would strongly encourage you to think hard about what changes might be necessary in your family. If you can’t get a child to pick up their socks, how will you get a math lesson done? I don’t say this in judgement, but in exhortation to seek help—a book, a friend, something. School will be so hard if behavior is constantly a problem. But if your family can work together cooperatively most of the time (because we all have some bad days!), then you can have peace in your homeschool. It will be worth the effort to spend some time addressing this during the summer months! As school begins, you will have a plan and some new habits in place.
As you consider carefully how to best prepare your home and family for this school year, don’t forget that it’s all a learning process for you as well as your kids. Did your great idea fall flat? No problem. Try something else. Evaluate. Adjust. And while not all school is fun, plan a few fun things. Add some traditions that help your kids look forward to special days. What are you going to do for the first day of school? Last day? Will you celebrate 100 days of school? Plant a tree on Arbor Day?
We truly hope that you enjoy your children as you learn together and grow in knowledge. A well-prepared home and family is an important step to a successful year. You have a team waiting here to support you. Please reach out as you have needs and questions.
-Rebecca LaSavio
Preparing for Your Year, part 3 - Samples
It’s time to talk about samples! Each Learning Period, your teacher will collect a sample that demonstrates your student’s best work in a specific subject. In part 1 of Preparing for Your Year I suggested that as you’re breaking up your year, you should take samples into consideration and plan for them. Let’s talk about how to do that!
What is a sample?
Each learning period (approximately 20 school days), we are required to turn in a sample of each student’s work. For TK – 8th grade, one core subject (Math, Language Arts, Science, and Social Studies) will need to be turned in each LP. Each subject will be turned in twice during the year, making 8 samples total. Exactly which subject and when it’s turned in will come from your teacher. For High School, a sample from each class listed on the Master Agreement (MA) will be turned in each learning period.
Why do we do this?
Each of the schools that are part of the Sequoia Grove Charter Alliance have their own charter—permission from the state of California to function. As part of this agreement, the schools have a responsibility to show that the students enrolled are, in fact, learning. The schools need to show that the state funds they receive are put to good use and the children in their care are receiving a good education. There are two primary methods used to demonstrate this: testing and samples.
Before I get into the nuts and bolts about how to produce a good sample, I’d like to share a little of my own journey about my understanding of samples and my attitude toward them. If you, like me, appreciate the freedom of homeschooling and chaff against the accountability aspect of belonging to a charter, perhaps it will help you have an easier time with this responsibility.
Our family lived overseas in a developing country for many years. Our schooling options were limited, so I homeschooled. I was completely independent (and lonely!). There was no accountability, but also no help. I had to evaluate all of my curriculum options online and didn’t have other families to share with or discuss ideas. There was no switching curriculum mid-year, because nothing was available locally—not even a library! This experience toughened me up as a homeschool parent but also left us wishing for more opportunity for sharing, classes, field trips, music lessons, and more.
When we came back to the States in 2019, we thought it was temporary. For the months that we were going to be here, we decided to enroll in a charter school so we’d be legal, and hey, free money for field trips! But then I was asked for samples of my kids’ work. That felt invasive. That felt like somebody out there didn’t trust me to do what I’d been doing for years. I had a terrible attitude. I turned in my samples, but I wasn’t happy about it.
Why am I telling you all this? Because here’s what I realized. I have enrolled my children in a school. A public school. When my children and I signed the master agreement, we signed a contract that we will abide by the rules that come with those funds. I will provide the school with evidence of learning; they will provide me with the materials I need to educate my children at home in ways that our family budget wouldn’t allow otherwise. And I get to choose those materials! I get to choose the schedule, the activities, and the focus. The more cooperative we all are, the less ammunition those who would fight the charter school system have to argue that it’s a waste of money.
In short, I have had an attitude change. I have the privilege of belonging to a large group of like-minded homeschoolers with lots of resources and staff who are ready to help and advise me. My responsibility is to use it wisely and give evidence that this method is effective. Do I enjoy putting samples together? Not particularly. But that’s ok. I can do it anyway and do it on time and correctly so that I’m not a burden to my teacher. After all, she’s also a homeschool mom trying to do her job well and be helpful to me.
I’ve also come to realize how much easier it is to get samples done when I have planned ahead. I know that I will need to provide 8 samples throughout the year. When I am ready for that, it’s so much easier. When you meet with your teacher, you’ll discuss which samples will be collected each LP (learning period).
What do I have to do?
Now that we’re ready to prepare our samples, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts. The fact is, it’s a simple process. Here’s a basic list of what is required:
Samples must:
be original student work and from a non-religious publisher.
be neat and easy to read, including scanned copies.
include both questions and answers.
handwritten samples must have a handwritten name/date
On the top, each sample needs:
the student's first and last name (written by the student if able)
be dated within the requested learning period (month/day/year).
The subject and grade level (for example, Science 3)
An evaluation or grade (happy face for lower grades, percentage or letter grade for upper grades)
That’s it! Now we can talk about what to choose as a sample, and how to turn them in. I want to preface this next part by saying that every teacher has nuances as to what they request, and it can vary by the needs of individual families. I am simply here to help you understand the process and help you with some ideas. Your teacher gets the final say.
How do I put a good sample together?
The simplest way to choose a sample is to choose a worksheet, a story, or a report your child has written. Have your child write his or her name and date, and you’re done. But there are lots of other options through a photo sample.
Photo samples can be a great way to show learning activities. This gives you the opportunity to display all of the non-traditional ways of teaching and learning that we homeschoolers value so highly. A photo sample is simply that—take a picture of a child doing an activity or something they’ve made and then the child either describes what it is they’ve learned or answers some questions about it. You can use the photo sample template or create your own.
Things you can take pictures of:
Science experiments
Gardening
Craft that support a social studies lesson
A child working on the computer doing a math lesson
A field trip
Nature finds
If you are struggling to come up with an idea for a sample, ask yourself, “What are three things we’ve learned recently?” Think through what you’ve read, what educational TV you’ve watched, what places you’ve visited, or what your children have helped you do around the house.
If you are not usually tied down to a particular curriculum, consider putting a calendar in a handy spot to jot down what you do throughout the day—books, games, news, etc. Using your school planner to record rather than plan is also an option! You will have a great reference of all the learning activities that you have done when it’s time for a sample.
Maybe you are struggling with a sample for high school literature. Google the book your student has been reading. For instance, “Scarlet Letter questions” and choose 5 for them to answer. They can type the questions and answers and turn in a great sample!
BrainPop, TeachersPayTeachers, Twinkl, and lots of other websites have helpful options for looking up something you are learning about and helping you put it on paper as a sample. Our family does literature-based history. That can sometimes make coming up with a Social Studies sample challenging. Last year, my son studied ancient history. We were able to find a worksheet about the pyramids to reinforce what he had already been learning about the ancient Egyptians.
Again, all of this will flow naturally out of your school if you remember to plan ahead for it. Has your teacher asked for a science sample for LP 2? Look at your science book or planner. What will you be doing then? What would make for a great sample? Make a note to yourself and you won’t have to worry about it when the time comes.
Do your older students resist samples? Since high school students have to produce a packet of work for each learning period, it’s really important to have their cooperation. Perhaps it would be helpful to have a conversation with them before school begins. Do they understand the responsibility that comes with the privileges they get from the school? What would their education be like if they didn’t have the funds from the school for the lessons and activities that they love? If you homeschooled privately and didn’t have to show evidence of learning, would your family budget still allow for those things? When they understand, perhaps they would be more willing to get on board and do the work necessary.
Turning it in.
Your teacher will help guide you on the specific method for turning in a sample, but often the best way is to download a scanning app like Tiny Scanner or CamScanner. There’s even a scanner built into iPhones. You can snap a picture of the paper you want to submit and email it directly to your teacher. It only takes a few minutes.
Here are a few tips to make sure that your teacher doesn’t have to ask you to re-submit it.
Lay the paper on a well-lit surface and take the picture from above. Your thumb is not part of the work!
Evaluate the picture. Is it blurry? Are the name and date clearly visible and legible? Make sure it’s not too dark or too bright to read.
Samples in pdf format are the easiest for your teacher to manage. The scanner apps can create that.
For high school samples, make sure the student’s name and date are at the top of each sample and scan the entire packet of work as one single pdf file.
You’ve got this. By learning period 8, you will be a pro. Your kids are doing really cool things and learning a lot while they’re at it. Show your teachers and let’s make our schools proud this year!
Video: How to Create A Sample
How to Create a Sample.mp4