Leaving Oz

Planning for the School Year

Many of my friends and neighbors are zipping up the backpacks, labeling the jackets and packing up their children's lunches as school starts this week in our community.  As for our family, we just finished up school year 07-08 the last week of July, and I breathed a very short sigh of relief as my final attendance records, evaluation forms and report cards were all sent in to my host school. 

It's been a working summer for us.  Any week when we didn't have a summer camp or visitors we spent measuring perimeters, reading about the Good Queen Bess, or practicing the piano.  I feel so ready for a vacation, but now is the time to plan for the upcoming scholastic year.

Achieving on the Stanford Achievement Test

As a homeschooling mom, there are different ways for me to assess how my children are learning. For reading, I listen to them read. For spelling, we work on phonograms and spelling lists. I can tell at the end of the week what Charlie knows how to spell and what he doesn’t. For math, there are assessments every five lessons as well as fact drills. For history and science, I mostly ask them what they remember from the lesson or the reading. I have mental tabs on how fluently they’re reading, what spelling words continually trip them up, and what facts just won’t stick.

We play an “I’m thinking of a historical figure who…” game when we’re waiting for our meal at restaurants, and often they can come up with the name or some semblance of it with enough clues. However, for the big picture, to see how my students fare in the “real world” of education, I rely on the SATs, the Stanford Achievement Test.

We have only taken this test for two years, and only my eldest has gone in to sit for the three hours at a time for three days with the other students who are also enrolled in the Independent Studies Program (ISP) of a particular private school in the South Bay. And every year, my husband and I wait for the results with bated breath. Why? Because we want to see how Charlie is doing; we want to see what the weak and strong areas may be. We want to see how we may have to tweak the program in the coming year. At least that’s what we tell ourselves.

My Seventh Grade Son and...Sex?

“Mom, we saw the video today.”

“What video?”

“You know.  THE video.  Human reproduction!”

Whaaaa?  How come I wasn’t told about this?  My son Erik is in 7th grade at a public middle school.  I thought they saved the Sex Unit until 8th grade.  I really did.

“Mom, you signed my weekly science form, remember?”

The teacher sends home a weekly science form with a description of what the kids are learning and the homework for the week – and I have been faithfully signing it since last September.   In the beginning of the year, I read it carefully.  Then I started quickly perusing it.  Then, I admit, I kind of stopped reading it – especially if I was in the middle of doing something, like cooking dinner, when my son would ask me to sign it.  I dug back into the recesses of my mind. Ah, I then remembered actually being asleep on the living room couch one afternoon when he thrust a pencil into my hand and asked me to sign his weekly science form.  My bad.

My son went into great detail about what they saw in the film.   “Yeah, Mom, they showed, like, the male and female parts together inside, and things were moving and stuff.”  He told me another kid whispered to him, “Whoa, I can’t believe they’re showing the yin-yang in the wha-hoo!”  For once, I was speechless.