heartofdakota.com

Hey all, I have been looking at a lot of curriculum over the past few weeks. I seem drawn to HOD and a few others. I'm worried about the Charlotte Mason approach though. I have taught in the public school system (high school) for 5 years. (Now home with my kids though.) Numbers and testing is apart of how I was taught to teach. I know homeschooling is a completely different boat (shoot it might be a boat and I was driving a car) and I like the idea that I do know how my kids are doing by being with them in the curriculum, but I worry I will feel more like I am "playing school" and not actually teaching it because of my previous experience in the public schools with testing. When I was teaching I knew if a kid knew the information, but I could not always tell you their grade off the top of my head. So, I guess what I am asking is "Is anyone else test addicted? Do you find this freeing or is it something that takes time?" I'm not in a hurry just looking at preschool material right now, but any thoughts are helpful. Thanks.

I was a public school teacher for 5 + years in 2nd-6th grade. I actually felt that HOD matched my teaching style very much. I have my master's degree in integrating the arts into the curriculum, so that might be why. But I taught in a very small district that focused on teaching the whole child and not toward tests. I love homeschooling and would never go back as long as I can help it. I think your style is maybe geared toward older kids now, which is tricky, but as you go you will figure out what works for your family and the learning styles of each child. That will be more important! And your opinions and methods will adjust after seeing the success of one on one instruction given by the person who knows your child best -you! Have fun!

I have never taught public school, but probably like many of you I went to public school from K-12. When we first decided to hs our kids I did the same thing, looked at hs curriculum until I was nearly blind! I kept coming back to Charlotte Mason type studies and we ended up going with one and have loved it. This coming fall we will be switching to HOD which still feels very Charlotte Mason-like. I have been hs-ing for only 3 years and I still find myself in the ps mind set from time to time. What I am finding though, is that you don't need a test in each subject every week to see how your kids are doing. By being the parent and teacher it is easy to see what your kids are getting and what they are not and then make adjustments where necessary. I do implement some testing, i.e., spelling and now some math, but it is very low key. I think kids need to learn how to take tests because at some point in their education/life they will need to know how. My kids are still young, 2nd, K, and preK so there isn't a need yet for tests really. It's hard when you come from a ps background to re-program your thinking to that of a homeschooler. However, it is wonderfully freeing too!!! Some kids might strive in a more test driven type learning style, so far mine don't. I say if you are strongly being led to one curriculum, try it out and see how it goes. That's the beauty of homeschooling, if it doesn't quite work out you can tweak it so it does!

Maybe this will help. Carrie Austin, author of this program, was a classroom teacher (I believe public), before homeschooling. I'm sure she would be happy to tell you why she decided on this approach to schooling.

I was a public school (high school math) teacher too. I love the lack of testing.

Unfortunately, as part of the virtual charter school we plan to participate in next year (still using HOD as written), I will have to give grades. That's something I've never done in all my eight-ish years of homeschooling. We'll deal with it, but I do consider it a negative.

Love it! Yes, I was a public school teacher for 7 years before God brought me home to teach my kids. It was an adjustment...but here is the thing: I know what my kids know and don't know without tests because of the constant interaction - the relationship! Classroom assessment is necessary in school because you have more than just a few kids- and it is what we (the teacher) are trained to do. Let's face it, it is what we are comfortable with.

I have found tests proved unnecessary because my kids and I are constantly discussing what we are learning about. The lesson comes up throughout the day. Truly, this has been totally freeing....but I won't lie...it took me time to get here.

I'm still a public school teacher (part time in an afterschool program) AND I homeschool my kids using HOD. it's been fun trying to bring some CM into my classroom. I think my kids are getting a MUCH better education and they have way more fun hands down than their public school counterparts. CM allows our day at home to run so smoothly that we can be finished before I go to work.

4Hispraise wrote:Love it! Yes, I was a public school teacher for 7 years before God brought me home to teach my kids. It was an adjustment...but here is the thing: I know what my kids know and don't know without tests because of the constant interaction - the relationship! Classroom assessment is necessary in school because you have more than just a few kids- and it is what we (the teacher) are trained to do. Let's face it, it is what we are comfortable with.

I have found tests proved unnecessary because my kids and I are constantly discussing what we are learning about. The lesson comes up throughout the day. Truly, this has been totally freeing....but I won't lie...it took me time to get here.

This...and I am not a public school teacher (but my husband was before getting into administration).

My contribution to this discussion comes from a year of homeschooling using aBeka, giving quizzes, tests, and grades. It was such a BAD year for myself and my two boys that they gladly went to public school for 5th and 7th grades after only one year of homeschooling (they had attended a private Christian school using aBeka prior to homeschooling). In retrospect, I think the testing actually got in the way of learning. Preparing for a test doesn't guarantee true learning. It does encourage cramming a bunch of information into the temporary memory. Grading tests and quizzes constantly about drove me insane. I could never be a teacher in public school. LOL I also expect that in the school situation, the teacher added something of interest or started discussions beyond the aBeka TM. I wouldn't know, for sure, but something about the classroom "fit" the curriculum better for my boys.

Fast forward a few years and I found the literature-based, Charlotte Mason and Ruth Beechick approaches. I tried it with my daughter (my youngest), and it fit us so very well! Finding HOD was the piece of the puzzle that finished out the approach for us and made it perfect for us.

4Hispraise is so right that you do know what your child knows without tests or grades. In fact, we are using a different math curriculum than recommended and even skip quizzes and tests with that. I reteach missed problems until she gets them (it is an incremental spiral approach) and get them she does. I know exactly which concepts she struggles over, even before she reviews them. BTW, she seems perfectly motivated without receiving any grades, an argument for grades I've often seen.

Likewise, with narration, your child is not off the hook, at all! In fact, it is rather like the child has to write the test AND pass the test all rolled up into one. It is more difficult than a fill-in-the blank, matching, T/F test. Best of all, with real literature, and HOD's open-ended discussion questions, we enjoy school. There is depth to it that just wasn't there with the textbook/workbook approach.

Do expect a different scope and sequence, especially one area--writing. I am on board with delaying writing. I cannot imagine my 3rd grader last year writing a 5-paragraph essay, at least not without a lot of hand holding. Frankly, having writing too early seems senseless to me and probably reinforces bad spelling, capitalization and punctuation, as well. I like the copywork approach, and my dd has seemed to bloom into writing with no formal instruction, as yet (we just finished Bigger). I think she will do wonderfully with written narrations in Preparing.

I've often heard that teachers have the most difficulty in adjusting to homeschool. At least in our house, homeschool looks very little like a classroom. It probably looks more like what you would do when you help your little ones with their homework for school....sitting on the couch reading a book together...or at the dining room table together, helping when they are stuck on something but letting them do as much as they can on their own. Meanwhile mom may run into the kitchen to prepare lunch on change out the laundry. Yes, not anything like school!

I teach at a Community College and I picked HOD because of all of what we have learned in the last decade regarding the brain and learning. The HOD method matches everything I wanted to do with my children. I can tell you from my own experience tests mean nothing. I teach an 18 month program and the last semester we review to prepare students for boards. It is amazing how those A students (on the tests) can't recall half of what we start to review the last semester. The integration with HOD is amazing and as you go along you will be amazed how your children recall bits of information in everyday conversations.

LfGod1 wrote: When I was teaching I knew if a kid knew the information,...

We brought our oldest home for 7th grade and started using a lit based/CM approach beginning in 8th. The wonderful thing about using this approach is you do know if your kid is learning. It's not just memorize a fact, take a test, and move on. The lit based approach means you're interacting with your child as they/you read living books, narrate, and discuss them. It's hard for a child to fool you into thinking they know something they don't. You'll know what they know.

Hi LfGod1, and welcome to the HOD Board! I taught ps for 7 years and received my master's degree in educational administration just prior to homeschooling. I too wondered about Charlotte Mason's ideas, and how I would be able to assess my dc using them. Through the past decade, I have found that the truth is that Charlotte Mason's methods help me better assess what my dc know, and encourage higher level thinking in the process, more than any other teaching methods I have used.

Charlotte Mason did not believe in simply reading living books, though reading living books is a staple of her methods. She believed in higher level assessments, such as oral narrations and written narrations. I used to think these were NOT higher level. I thought quizzes, tests, worksheets were harder and therefore higher level. This is so not true. Giving an oral narration or a written narration is a much higher level skill and a much more difficult assessment. Multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false, word bank, etc. type papers all give "helps" to students. They can guess their way through them. They can also use the clues/helps to arrive at the 'right' answer without knowing the material as well. Giving an oral narration or a written narration is just the opposite. There are no helps. There are no clues. There is no way to guess. They simply must know the material well enough to retell what they have read, and it is much, much harder than it seems. Put yourself in their shoes, and imagine you have just read or just heard someone else read a living book about a topic somewhat new to you. Now, you could either take a 10 point quiz on the book (which BTW often focuses on the very lowest sections of Bloom's Taxonomy), OR, you have to retell with as much detail as possible all you can recall about the book. Clearly the retelling is more difficult and requires the use of the highest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy as you are mentally sifting and sorting through what was read to decide what to share, attempting to choose the proper sequence to use, incorporating some new vocabulary/names/events in your retelling, and eventually developing (hopefully ) your own style of narrating with a little personality and creativity. Now, THERE's a meaningful, difficult assessment, right?

You may be concerned about what to expect in a narration and how to help your dc improve their narrations over time. No need to worry! HOD has excellent guidance. The Appendices of HOD guides include checklists of oral and written narration helps for both the teacher and the student, as well as a super helpful editing checklist for the written narrations. The guides themselves follow a progression of skills in narration, and encourage growth from year to year by the activities and assignments in each guide. Other LA based CM helps included in the HOD guides are a progression from Level 2 through 8 of dictation, daily copywork, poetry study, and the Common Place Book. The CM methods of using living books for all subject areas, completing a timeline, nature study, classical music, picture study, memorization of Scripture/poetry/etc. are also included across the HOD curriculum.

Portfolio assessment is another wonderful way HOD helps assess our dc's progress. Students keep a portfolio with tabs including their work from various subject areas. Beginning with CTC, HOD provides History Student Notebook pages that are absolutely beautiful. One of our favorite things to do is to pull out our portfolios from years' past and look through them. The progress is obvious - so visual it cannot be denied. HOD has many, many other forms of assessment - from discussions, to notebooking assignments, to experiments, to multiple-step projects, to comprehension questions, to research using multiple media, to Socratic discussions, to mapping exercises, to re-enactments, and more - so you don't have to feel that narrations are the only forms of assessment within HOD.

However, since your question is in regard to CM, I want to encourage you that you are so not alone in these thoughts! There are many threads on the board about this, as CM is new to most of us, whether we were ps teachers or whether we are just recalling the methods we were schooled with ourselves. I am very glad you asked about this, and on a hunch that you may enjoy research, I will leave you with some interesting reading here ...

HOD and Charlotte Mason (by Carrie):
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2453

Testing vs. CM Approach within HOD:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4693&p=34480

Philosophy Behind Narration Skills:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8918

Narration Discussion and Examples:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8118&p=60893#p60893

Higher Level Thinking in HOD from Carrie:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8178

Switching from Textbooks to HOD:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=6096

HOD’s Notebooking – teaching skills while still providing for creativity and individuality:
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9041&p=66127

Why do you “heart” HOD?
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=8268&p=60839#p60839

HTH, but keep asking questions! We LOVE to help here!
In Christ,
Julie