Assessment: How is my child progressing?

Every homeschool parent wonders if his or her child is “keeping up” with peers in formal school settings. How do you know if your child is learning what society expects of children at a particular grade level? Many of the educational materials mentioned in previous posts are based on national standards and include tests with answer keys. These will provide you with some measure of your child’s progress. However, the only way to know how your child is stacking up against other students in your state is by administering the state’s standardized test. By law, homeschoolers cannot take these tests during regular test administration because the exams are supposed to serve as a measure of a public school’s performance, not the child’s performance. But, let’s face it, if the child fares well on the state’s standardized test, he or she has obviously mastered what needs to be learned for the grade level. In Massachusetts, copies of the previous year’s tests, along with answer keys, are available on the state Department of Education website. The state even provides copies of actual student-written test essays and shows how they were scored.

Allegra's take: Taking the standardized tests put my mind at ease when I was worrying that I wasn’t keeping up with those in public school. Taking the tests provided in books aligned to standards was handy too.

Taking inventory: our first year

Daily schedule, alternating weeks

As my 13-year-old daughter and I wrap up our first homeschool year, we are taking inventory of all we have accomplished vis-à-vis the state curriculum frameworks--and I am amazed. Starting last September, we comfortably met all the academic requirements by April 1. In December, Allegra passed a seventh-grade Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System test with only three incorrect responses. She’ll be taking another standardized test in June. Meanwhile, we have moved on to eighth-grade materials. We follow a schedule, but we don’t adhere to it strictly. The alternating two-week lineup is shown above.

The four-hour morning block is more fluid than it appears on the schedule: sometimes we spend more time on Language Arts, other times more on World History and often the two meld. The same applies to math and science. We’re flexible about taking field trips and attending programs of interest. Some homeschoolers eschew a schedule, but I find it keeps us organized and on task. The beauty of homeschooling is that your child can work at his or her own pace, while exploring his or her particular interests. The downside is lack of student interaction. Homeschooling can be isolating.

Allegra's take: It’s true that homeschooling is isolating; lack of interaction with peers is really the only major limitation homeschooling has. Although a few of my extracurricular activities are taken with other children my age, the fact remains that it is only my mother and I in the “classroom” all day.

The variety of the schedule is good and keeps things new: one week we have more English and history, the next week we focus more on math and science. As I have been in public school all of my life before this year, at the beginning of homeschooling I found the fact that we didn’t study all major subjects every day disconcerting. I have gradually become accustomed to the new way of doing things and am now quite content with it.

The schedule also gives us the chance to meld our classes into one. For example, when we were studying the ancient Greeks and Romans, we learned the history of the people, the literature of the time, and Greek and Latin root words all morning, combining English and history into one long class. On math and science days, we discussed contributions the Greeks and Romans made to the sciences and mathematics. This type of learning, which is often not available in public schools, prevents much confusion and puts concepts into context.