Sixth Grade Homeschool Curriculum

For many of you, whether you home school or educate through the public or private system, the school year is coming to an end. Hopefully that means your 6^th grader made it through, relatively unscathed.

Did you see great changes in your child this year? Did they start out very child like, only to finish the school year looking and acting more like the almost teenager they are becoming? Nostalgia is a great thing, and yet time marches on.

I guess that brings me to the next question I have for you and one we are going to have to consider as well. Will you continue to do school through the summer, or are you letting your child take the summer off?

When we began home schooling, we worked through the summers since where we live is miserably hot during the summer and being in the air conditioning is where we wanted to be anyway. Add to that the idea that I was not willing to let my daughter sit idle for too long. She has been likened to a border collie with no job. If you leave her idle, she digs holes in the yard, literally and figuratively!!

I would love to hear what you plan to do, and I will let you know what we plan next time. Please come back to see what we decide to do!!

I have decided to use Prentice Hall Science Explorer for the rest of 6^th, 7^th, and 8^th grade. I don’t know if it is the best out there, but I do know that it meets the standards in both the state we live in now, and the state that will be our final destination when we complete our major move over the course of the next couple of months. It doesn’t hurt that I got a great deal on the auction site for the entire set!!

The move I was speaking of? Well, we are trying to move to our “forever” home, the family homestead. There are so many things to wrap up here, and so much work left to do on the house there, but we have begun the process of moving from here to there. By that I mean we go there, take a trailer full of stuff, work on the house, and come back here to work, church, and friends, including our home school group. We don’t know how long it will take for us to get there full time, so this is kind of an open ended move.

I wanted to go ahead and get my daughter working on her new science books, because the move is going to make everything be up in the air, unsettled, and somewhat scary. It is a great thing that we home school because when everything else changes in her life, school will still be a constant. Our core curriculum will not change. It is just one less thing for a 6^th grade “tween” to have that is stable and familiar.

I told you last time I would share what I discovered when I asked my fellow home schooling moms what they used and why with regards to science curriculum.

One mom, who has a 7^th grader, suggested two of the Christian based, distance “university” curricula. Now, before I go on, let me tell you that we do not home school for religious reasons, though we do not have a problem with religion. In fact, we do foster religion in our home. The biggest problem that I had with that mom’s suggestion is that the science follows a religious agenda that indicates that the world is much younger than science would indicate. Additionally, the theory of evolution is completely absent from the curriculum. Hmm…I need my daughter’s education to be as complete as possible, so neither of these will work for us.

Another mom was horrified when I mentioned that I was considering the text books that the area public school were using. Why, she asked, would I use books that “they” used? Wasn’t the reason we home schooled, to keep our children from being indoctrinated by the local government run education system? What?!

Ok, I don’t even know what to say to that…

I’m going to step away from writing for a little bit, because I realize that not everyone who has a 6^th grader has the same issue as we have at our house.

Science, now there is a topic worth discussing, at least where my daughter is concerned. She has completed her 6^th grade science curriculum. Yes, I know, but the school year isn’t over yet! That didn’t seem to matter to my daughter. Her favorite subject is science, and so she zips through it, and even studies science just for fun. She is going to be a veterinarian when she gets old enough, so she says.

Our core curriculum, Time4Learning, which includes original science content through 6^th grade has been a source of great enjoyment for my daughter. It is a great online curriculum, and contains more information than my daughter would be exposed to in public school. For that reason alone I love it.

The biggest problem we face now is that 7^th grade science is basically a repeat of 6^th grade. Because of that we are going to have to look for more science materials to feed my daughter’s hunger for all things science.

Because we home school, the first thing I did was ask my fellow home schooling moms what they used. I was amazed at the answers, and the reasons for their choices. I’ll tell you more next time!

My daughter’s reluctance where writing is concerned has kind of come to a head. First of all, I can’t understand her reluctance, because writing is what I do for a living. How can she not LOVE to write?! So, in an effort to reconcile our differences here, we are implementing a series of steps to hopefully bring her closer to my point of view! (I know, it’s wrong, I should be more flexible…yeah..ok!)

We are trying different things to make writing more pleasant. The first is to make writing more comfortable physically. We have invested in a couple of fountain pens. If you have ever written with a fountain pen, you know that if you let the nib rest too long in one spot, a large ink blob forms. This means it has a kind of built in timer, keep the nib moving, or lift it off the paper, otherwise you leave big spots of ink, evidence of hesitation or distraction.

Additionally, you have to hold the pen at the right angle, and apply the right amount of force so that the ink will flow smoothly. This keeps my daughter from pressing too hard, or holding the pen strangely.

By using her “special pen” I get more cooperation when it comes to asking for a writing assignment, so whether the cause is psychological, or physical, the fountain pen is helping to get her to agree to at least try to type.

Writing is one of those subjects that she is just not comfortable with her grade level. Her mind thinks higher than 6^th grade, but her penmanship and spelling are much closer to 4^th grade than 6^th grade. Some education resources would call her a reluctant writer, and a reluctant speller.

I call her just plain difficult and hard headed! That being said, I know that she can write, because I have written the paragraphs she dictates. I have been wondering for a while if I should have her tested or evaluated for dysgraphia. Our pediatrician is unwilling or unable to consider this as a diagnosis, but from the things I read about dysgraphia, my daughter seems to have a number of the symptoms.

She complains that writing actually hurts her hand and arm. Her penmanship leaves much to be desired. Not only does she not like to write, but she is so convinced that she can’t that it makes for a bad day when I ask her to write anything. This is something we are going to work on this year. I probably have let her slide too long, letting her get away with saying she can’t write. You have heard the phrase that parents should pick their battles? This just might one of the battles I must face this year.

Are all 6^th graders caught between being little kids and big kids? I guess that is why they call them “tweens”. I noticed when we were looking for Christmas presents this past Christmas season that my daughter frantically looked at toy catalogs, and was almost obsessive about visiting the toy departments or toy stores. But when I would ask her for hints, she had a hard time telling me what she wanted from the toy store.

She also looked at the jewelry catalogs and jewelry counters, admiring the “shineys” but when asked which items she liked she didn’t have a lot of suggestions there either. Before you start feeling too sorry for her, know that she received gifts abundantly. It was just harder for her to make hints, and harder for us, as parents to come up with the presents that were going to make a great impact.

I’ve noticed that in other things she seems to be caught between being a little girl, and being a young lady. She doesn’t really care about trendy clothes, but she has unrealistic expectations about what she wants her hair to look like. She is like this in school also. Some subjects, she is ready to tackle more advanced work, bored with the grade offering in that subject. Others, she probably needs to back up two grades to be comfortable.

I wonder if she is supposed to be comfortable with the subjects or if she is supposed to be equally “tween-ish” in everything.

Last time I was giving you a little history, so I will wrap that one up really quick. The whole point of the matter is that she could be really advanced academically, but because of her emotional immaturity we ran into a situation in public school where she was going to be held back, not because she couldn’t do the work, but because the school thought she would not be ready to handle second grade. The school made that decision in October.

Because of that we decided to home school. My daughter doesn’t tolerate repetition very much and she had already done most of the first grade work before the school year had even started. So, I pulled her out of public school, and began our home schooling journey in January of that year. I decided to go ahead and put her in 2^nd grade work,.

Because I put her in second grade work, in the beginning of a calendar year our school year is kind of all over the place. She is ahead in some subjects, behind in some subjects, but we consider her a 6^th grader and let her participate in outside activities such as Sunday school, or 4H as a 6^th grader.

Now that you have a little history, I will try to switch gears and deal with some truly 6^th grade issues. Please join us, and feel free to comment.

One of the problems we have experienced in schooling my daughter is that she is really smart. (I know, I know…every kid is smart to their parents!) And why would that be a problem you ask? Well, stay tuned and I’ll tell you!

One of the things we found when my daughter started kindergarten was that academically she was far ahead of where she was in her maturity. We faced a lot of impulsiveness, and outbursts, and impatience. At the same time she was unwilling to do what they asked her to do in school because she had already done that work at home. Little did I know that this was a precursor to what we would face throughout lower elementary school.

So, but the end of kindergarten we had finally gotten her to agree to do some of the schoolwork. Because we had her engaged, I decided to go ahead and start 1^st grade work right away at the beginning of the summer, instead of giving her the summer off and having to coax her into complying again when first grade started. Boy, was that ever a mistake! Or maybe not, I guess it depends on your point of view.

Tell you more next time!

Happy New Year!

I have a sixth grader! I’m guessing if you are reading this you probably do, too. Over the course of the year I will be exploring what that means, ways to help them, and how to survive the insanity.

We are homeschoolers and our school year really doesn’t run with the public school year, so I might be talking about things that are in our home school that might not be happening in real school. We have been straddling grades for a couple of years now.

My daughter loves, loves, loves science, and so she will preferentially do science before she will do any other subject. In fact, there are days when all we get done is science. Because of this, she zips through her science curriculum.

Unfortunately, she dislikes math, tolerates language arts, dislikes spelling, and hates writing. Whew! As you can see, I have my hands full getting her to do other subjects besides science.

On a positive note, she loves to read, and play games, and she even likes social studies, so that is good news. Join me for the trials and tribulations of guiding a 6^th grader the year!