Open Book Test

When we took our kids out of public school they did not know how to learn.
For the most part, they would read, close the book and forget what they just read.
One of my big goals in homeschooling them would be to teach them to learn.

The best way I have found is to let them take their history tests open-book.
They look over the test.
Then I play the cd.
I pause as they need.
I "go back" as needed too.
While it is subtle, I have noticed that they are retaining more information this way.

What about you, do you have open-book tests?
How do you teach your kids to learn?

We interrupt...

We interrupt this scheduled clothesline post o actually talk about homeschool! We have changed things up a bit since vacation and it's working out great! Before we tried to do all of the subjects each day. Now we are doing "Block Scheduling" and really like it. So, every day we do Bible. M/W/F is Math and Lang. Arts, T/Th is Science and History. Doing math & science on the same day was too much. We do more work on each subject and everything is running very smooth. J actually is looking forward to doing Math and LA tomorrow! WOW!

Also, for his science we started a sketchbook. He had a hard getting a lot of the last few lessons. So we are doing a major review. So instead of Q&A he is making a book of his science facts.
Ex. Science (ecology) is the Web of Life, so he made a big web with yarn in his book. He has a chart of decomposers, consumers, producers & predators, etc. You get the idea. He LOVES it!


C is learning astronomy, and the night sky has been neat to watch. With Jupiter and Venus lined up under the moon. She is tracking star patterns in her book right now for about 30 days. We will check the same part of the sky every ten days to see how it changes.

Now, I must get off so I can take pics of them making their gingerbread house!

Visual Velcro

I wanted to give you an update on how the Right Brain teaching is going. I am still learning how to teach the right-brainer, but here's some spelling tips. These have made a HUGE difference. It's all called Visual Velcro.

Here the words that J has gotten wrong are spelled out on old church concert tickets.
The letter he got right are in black.
The letters wrong are in green (whatever color you want.)
The sneaky, tricky, silent letters are given drawings, more colors, etc. to make them stand out.
As you can see above refrigerator has many different things going on. We started out with a little bit of visual velcro, and have added as needed. The green are the misspelled letters, the blue wavy lines are cold air under them. The red divides the sections of the word. The red around the "ator"are supposed to be lips "eating" that part of the word "ATE or". J drew the gator - ator. The orange are the letters he kept forgetting time after time.
Any visual velcro you can think of helps. J comes up with his own many times. Right Brainers are very visual and take pictures with their brains.

Also, here's how we practice. After writing the words. I hold them up. (My elbow is on the table, my hand is up in the air.) "Look and the first and the last letters and any funny letter." I instruct. After a few seconds. I put the card down. J keeps looking up at his "screen" to see the word in his head. We do this up and down with each word until he gets it. (Usually now more then five times.) We try to do this with each word everyday. The words that he doesn't get right I keep in and the right ones I take out at the end of the week.

These spelling words are kept in a baggie clothes pinned to our dry erase board. We also keep our Sentence rules, -ing rules there too. We use some visual velcro here too.
I hope this has helped. It may seem like a lot of work on your part, but it is fun and they really get into it. You won't have to do this forever. They will start to get it and make pictures for themselves in their mind automatically.

We have done the visual velcro with C too. She uses it a lot in test taking, review.