Notes from the Changing World of Home Education & Basic Skills (Archives)

The Secret of Edison's Success

No Right Answers, Please

Frisbees, Microwaves, and Velcro

Analyze This

Excuse me for thinking

Asking Questions that make Education Real

Those who can, do; and Those who can't, Teach

Cleaning up Mind Clutter

Comprehending or Cluttering Part 1

Not the 3 “R’s”, but the 3 “D’s”

Just the Facts, Please! (Part One)

Five Reasons why Homeschoolers Reluctantly use Published Tests (and What to do About it)

Tests I Wished I'd Never Given

Are You Really Homeschooling this Year?
The Science of Homeschool

Practice Does not make Perfect

THE SECRET OF EDISON'S SUCCESS

Before I move on to the sixth and highest level of questioning we can use to determine the depth of our student’s understanding, here’s a question for you to answer. It will engage you in thinking at the synthesis level and reveal the secret (or at least one of them) of Thomas Edison’s Success. Once you have chosen an answer, click to find out if you’re right.

Below is a math problem I recently presented to a group of home-schooled students:

Find the value of each letter in this multiplication problem:

STUVWXYZ
_______xZ__
  111,111,111 (That would be one-hundred eleven million, one-hundred eleven thousand, one-hundred eleven)

In what order did the student who successfully solved this problem engage in the following synthesis level activities?

A. First he proposed, then experimented, and lastly rearranged to get his answer.  CLICK HERE

B. First he rearranged, then proposed, and lastly experimented to get his answer.  CLICK HERE

C. First he experimented, then proposed, and lastly rearranged to get his answer.   CLICK HERE

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

PS: Are your kids bored with their current grammar book? Hard not to be if it’s just drill, drill, and more drill… If you’d like a sneak peak at a new product we’re working on to make learning and using grammar fun, check out Grammar Bytes featured in our Product Spotlight by clicking here. You can download three sample lessons for free!

If you care to comment or have a question about what I’ve written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to www.basicskills.net.

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NO RIGHT ANSWERS, PLEASE

In my last article, I said synthesis thinking results in the creation of something new and different. Students working on this level enter into creative and imaginative thinking. They produce original ideas and solve problems. The results are a variety of outcomes, all acceptable to one degree or another.

No, I’m not talking about throwing out the answer key… It has its place. Just not as large of one as our friendly textbook publishers would have us believe. What I am talking about is creating the kind of atmosphere in our homes where our children feel comfortable in drawing from a number of facts and subjects so that new and interesting theories and predictions are produced.

It’s the question that keeps “it” going. It’s the “right answer” that puts “it” to rest, maybe never to awaken. And no, I’m not talking about challenging the authority of Scripture and the verities of the Christian faith.

OK, I said I would give you something practical and unpack this a little more. Here are a few questions and tasks you might try to help you cultivate synthesis thinking in your children:

Industrial Arts: “How would you assemble these things to create a chair?”

Government: “How would your life be different if you were born in Asia?”

Geometry: “Arrange these shapes to make a rectangle.”

Math: “What’s another way to solve this problem?”

Social Studies: “If you ruled an imaginary country, what would be the “most important rules everyone would follow?”

Science: “Design an experiment to demonstrate…”

English: “Use the following words to make a poem.”

Let’s go a little deeper into the last subject, English. You’ve probably heard your children say one or both of the following: “I don’t know what to write” or (when the focus is grammar) “I’m bored.” We’ll, grammar is often boring and tedious. When it comes to learning and reviewing it, students are faced with seemingly endless workbook pages filled with exercise after exercise, repeating the same kind of drill over and over again, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.

Drill isn’t necessarily bad, and an understanding of grammar can lead to effective writing. Nevertheless, there are better ways to approach this task without the student feeling like they’re getting a daily dose of mental Novocain each time they open their grammar book.

Previously I presented a story that described how Velcro was invented. What if we used this interesting story to teach, review and actually use the parts of speech in a writing assignment? In our Friday School here at Basic Skills, we’ve been using a product that does this very thing. Utilizing crossword puzzles and interesting stories, students are learning, reviewing, and applying the parts of speech each week.

If you’d like to see what this looks like and try it at home, click here.

Until next time, thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

If you care to comment or have a question about what I’ve written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to www.basicskills.net.

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FRISBEES MICROWAVES AND VELCRO

Frisbees, Microwave Ovens, and Velcro have something in common…

In the 1940’s Yale students sailed pie tins through the air and played catch. Ten years later, Walter Frederick Morrison, a flying-saucer enthusiast, improved on the idea. Morrison and the company Wham-O produced and sold a saucer-like disk which they called a Frisbee. It was named after the baker William Russel Frisbie whose reusable pie tins in the 1870’s provided the original source of the fun.

During World War II, Britain’s radar system used microwaves to track Nazi warplanes. Several years later, Percy LeBaron Spencer discovered they could also cook food when he accidentally came into contact with a microwave that melted a candy bar in his pocket. Many experiments later, the first microwave oven was put on sale in 1954.
George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, returned from a walk outside one day in 1948 to find some cockleburs clinging to his jacket. He took one off and upon examining it under a microscope, he found a maze of thin strands with little hooks on each end that caused them to cling to fabrics. Eight years and many experiments later, Mestral had created a new fastener: Velcro!

So you say the point is… The point is that all of the above inventions are the result of thinking on the synthesis level, the fifth step of our hierarchy of questions we use to check our children’s understanding. Simply put, synthesis thinking results in the creation of something new and different. It is important to note that it does not take place in a vacuum; students typically first possess a level of skills and information and apply them with rigor and structure. The top artists, athletes, actors, and musicians spend innumerable hours studying, practicing, and perfecting their discipline before reaching the level of excellence that brings about regional, national, or even international notoriety.

The problem we’re faced with as home educators is again textbooks and their “tests” that don’t move beyond the knowledge and comprehension levels. These publishers would lead us to believe that recalling the right answer is the ultimate measure of educational achievement, not realizing that such information should be seen as a launching pad for higher levels of thinking. But in all fairness, asking questions or assigning tasks that require thinking on the synthesis level isn’t easy.

Questions or tasks that require thinking on the synthesis level often include words such as:

Assemble
Build
Compose
Create
Develop
Devise
Design
Formulate
Integrate
Modify
Organize
Plan
Propose
Rearrange
Revise
Rewrite

Again, being able to respond to questions or tasks that require this level of thinking typically presumes the student has a degree of knowledge, understanding, application, etc. in the given discipline. Synthesis thinking usually doesn’t take place in a vacuum. In my next article, I'll unpack this a little more and suggest some specific tasks you can include in your home schooling day to stimulate this important level of thinking in your children.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

If you care to comment or have a question about what I’ve written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to www.basicskills.net.

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ANALYZE THIS!

I said in my last ezine that analytic thinking can be broken down into three steps which I summarized as:

1. Taking things apart mentally

2. Examining the parts and their relationship to each other

3. Examining the parts and their relationship to the whole

Questions that require this kind of thinking might be framed like the following:

“What factors led to The Great Depression?

“List some arguments that could support the notion of global warming as well as some arguments that could refute it”

“In what ways is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe typical of C.S. Lewis’s writing and in what ways is it unique?

“Given the following six numbers, identify the one that does not belong.”

All of the questions above require the student to sort information and take it apart mentally. They require him to examine it carefully noting patterns, relationships, and distinctions. They require him to creatively reorganize the pieces back into something he has perhaps never thought of with the result that his understanding will have been expanded.

Now it’s time to answer a question that will require you to apply what I’ve just presented. Once you’ve chosen an answer, click to find out if you’re correct. Don’t go “random” on me; be sure your answer stems from analytic thinking.

Consider the following six numbers. Analyze all of them to find a common relationship and identify one that does not belong.

  302              807              607             100             928            584

A. The number that does not belong is 302           click here

B. The number that does not belong is 584           click here

C. The number that does not belong is 607           click here

D. The number that does not belong is 928           click here

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

If you care to comment or have a question about what I've written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to our website, www.basicskills.net.

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EXCUSE ME FOR THINKING

The ability to think creatively and engage in problem solving begins with the skill of analysis or what educators call analytic thinking. Analytic thinking can be broken into three steps:

1. Take things apart mentally
2. Examine the parts and their relationship to each other
3. Examine the parts and their relationship to the whole

As home schoolers, we have the opportunity to ask questions and present learning situations that can help our students think in this way. Once they understand interrelationships, they will be able to reorganize information in new patterns and create with it. However, if we’re afraid to deviate from the “right answer” as presented in an answer key or teacher edition, we’ll stifle the growth of this important skill as the following true story illustrates:

A ten-year-old student was shocked when a substitute teacher handed back a recently-scored pop quiz. To his surprise, he was awarded an “F” missing 10 out of 10 points. One question missed went something like this: Katie went to the store to buy flour for her mother. She found a one-pound sack of flour for $.40 and a five-pound sack for $1.65. Which was a better buy?

Feeling proud that he had broken the question apart and analyzed it thoroughly, the student had come up with a creative solution and stated that both answers could be right given the limited information provided. For instance, nothing was said about how many family members there were which would affect the consumption rate, or if the bag could be stored properly so as to avoid spoilage and bugs, and how much money Katie had at the time, etc. The teacher initially listened politely as he defended his answer to her, but she soon grew impatient referring to the teacher manual, the final seat of authority, which said unequivocally that the right answer was the five-pound sack!

The student asked to see the teacher manual for himself to which the teacher responded, “Don’t be ridiculous, then you would know all the answers.”

What was quickly becoming an argument, he answered back, “No, I would only know the so-called ‘right answers’ which you know, which would mean I wouldn’t really know anything at all. I’d be just like you.” His final remark became an immediate ticket to the principal’s office.

Bad attitude aside, sadly the teacher was not prepared to affirm a thought process that used analysis to reach a creative solution. In my next ezine, we’ll look at how to do this in more detail.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

It’s simple. This offer ends January 31 so act now!

If you care to comment or have a question about what I've written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to our website, www.basicskills.net.

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ASKING QUESTIONS THAT MAKE EDUCATION REAL

Home schoolers should think about two principles when it comes to “application” type questions. They are:

1. Information and skills become useful to the degree they can be applied to new situations.
2. Students need to have experience in applying what they have “learned” to new problems or situations. Their ability to apply what they have learned reveals the depth of learning.

Below is a true story that illustrates these two principles.

Before leaving for Vietnam to serve as a fighter pilot, a student attended a class in advanced gunship. Part of the course content included knowing emergency procedures in the event that something went wrong on a mission. They were so important that he had committed them to memory. He bragged to his flight instructor that they were so memorized he could literally recite them in his sleep. The lieutenant, a veteran aircraft pilot, simply nodded and said, “Good.”

The lieutenant orally quizzed the student for a half an hour in which the student responded with the correct answer to every question asked. The lieutenant affirmed the student’s complete memorization of all the procedures and suggested they board an aircraft and practice shooting.

Once in the air, the target practice began. Without warning, the lieutenant purposely killed the engine and the aircraft began to descend toward the earth, out of control. The student, shocked by his instructor’s action, panicked. On top of this, he couldn’t recall any of the emergency procedures he had “learned” and so confidently recited earlier that day. About 100 feet from hitting the ground, the lieutenant took back control of the aircraft and the lesson, which really wasn’t about practice shooting, was over.

Like the above story illustrates, the key to asking questions that require application, is real life experience.

So… how do we set this up when home schooling? It might help us to think and ask the number one question our children are often asking themselves, “When are we going to use this?”

A few possibilities:

Math: Use math skills to build or remodel something. All four operations, problem solving, measurement tasks will be required.

Home Economics: Make dinner. Use a recipe. Purchasing the necessary ingredients, measuring accurately, following directions, are just a few skills that will be tested.

English: Write a paper for publication or contest entry. Research skills, formatting standards, grammar, spelling, and punctuation must all come together if the end result is to be of “presentation quality.”

Art/Crafts: Engage in projects that in order to complete, competency in certain skill sets must be acquired.

Athletics: Sports such as soccer or basketball require the application of skills in a team context

History: “History repeats itself” as the saying goes. Dig beneath the facts of history and look at the circumstances and causes that lead to the outcome. The wisdom literature of the Bible is an excellent pattern to follow. Look at today’s current events and hazard a few guesses as to what’s going to happen in the future.

Science: Learn the scientific method and then apply it as a framework to understanding possible reasons why things happen the way they do in this field. Do experiments.

The ability to apply knowledge and skills to a new situation is foundational to the next three levels of questions we’ll be looking at.

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Now it’s time for you to answer a question that will require you to apply what I’ve just presented. Once you’ve chosen an answer, click to find out if you’re correct.

You find that you’ve reached the limits of your ability and patience to teach junior high math. You start looking for a tutor. Who do you choose?

A. A mother of seven.

B. A mother of three children grown children, all of whom graduated from college.

C. A non-credentialed tutor that you hear is “really good.”

D. A state-certified teacher

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

PS – Be sure to check out our new Becoming an Effective Writer Program on our home page. Take advantage of the free writing evaluation too!

If you care to comment or have a question about what I've written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to our website www.basicskills.net

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I’ll explain this in a minute.

Last week I celebrated Thanksgiving with friends and family in California. At dinner I was introduced to a former public school teacher. She was competent, dedicated, and loved kids. But she quit last year. She had had enough. Years before she had entered the profession because she loved kids, and now she was leaving for the same reason.

The quote, “Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach.” is attributed to H.L. Mencken (1880-1956). As cynical as this statement sounds (and professional teachers have raged against it and to this day continue to take offense), there is truth to be gleaned if we can just relax long enough to appreciate the caustic sarcasm. Mencken’s point may have been that teaching separated from application is next to useless. It has little relevance to the real world. Just a big mouth getting paid to move a lot.

The teacher I met last week could no longer tolerate the endless testing and measuring; grades on report cards had been replaced with dozens upon dozens of “academic outcomes” she was required to evaluate and document. She could no longer tolerate the shelving of her previous professional training and classroom know-how, not to mention common sense honed by her life experience (that’s right, she over 40) with a rigid lesson plan passed down from on high that required every teacher at the same grade level be on the same page of the same book on the same day or certain sanctions would be applied. Spontaneity and curiosity were all but outlawed. Besides, there wasn’t time, and teachers would get in trouble if caught using an unauthorized book. She knew this wasn’t good for the kids, and in good conscience she couldn’t continue. She quit.

Don’t think such administrative nonsense is limited to secular education. Years ago I was made aware of a major Christian institution and textbook publisher that was training new administrators in the same assembly-line approach to education. Sounded more like a car factory to me. They also sold textbooks to home schoolers. You’ve probably bought and used them. So have I, because they are good books, just needing some modification. One of my mentors taught me years ago to not be afraid to “filet the fish.” This is especially true if you use some secular books in your home school.

All this to say that to expand your children’s thinking, to insure their education is more that the result of simply a “moving mouth”, you must ask questions that require them to apply what they’re supposedly learning. They may need more than paper and pencil in order to respond correctly.

That’s the third “step” in our hierarchy of questions. In my next ezine, I’ll present examples and suggestions on how you can work these kinds of questions into your home school.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

PS – Be sure to check out our new Becoming an Effective Writer Program on our home page. Take advantage of the free writing evaluation too!

If you care to comment or have a question about what I’ve written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to www.basicskills.net.

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If you find yourself in a building that’s on fire, a one-or-two-word answer is all you want to the question, “Where’s the exit?” This is a step one kind of question and we’re grateful for a quick answer. However, like I said before, there are other kinds of questions we need to be asking to expand and develop our student’s thinking.

The second kind of questions we should be asking our students are those that measure comprehension, the second step of a series of steps if you remember our analogy. Being able to “know” and parrot back some piece of information may or may not be necessarily useful.

For example, what if I asked you to answer the following question, one that appeared on a popular home school science test (The test, by the way, is from a text I have personally used and highly recommend.):

“A strand of tRNA has the following nucleotide sequence: adenine, uracil, guanine. What codon in mRNA attracts this strand of tRNA?”

Well, I’ll bet the answer was not on the “tip of your tongue,” right? But, let’s say you studied the right sections of the chapter and you confidently answer, “Uracil, adenine, cytosine!” Great! An A+ answer according to the answer key. But, not so fast. What if I followed up with a couple of questions like, “Why is this the right answer,” or “Explain the significance of this information?” You might become especially annoyed if I jokingly pressed a little more with, “And why doesn’t spell check recognize the word uracil?”

In other words, someone can have the right answer, actually three right answers if you count the words to the above question. Maybe even spell the words correctly with impeccable handwriting. But so what? If we’re not careful, we can become like the ultimate anal- retentive religious leaders of Jesus’ day, the Pharisees. They had memorized vast amounts of Scripture and could quote it flawlessly, but they missed its meaning and purpose. Their comprehension was lacking. They didn’t get it. They also were not alone.

Too much focus on getting the facts right and giving right answers often results in simply cluttering your student’s mind. We need to move beyond the first step to the second step by asking questions that help us see how well our students understand the content we are presenting.

Here are some questions you may want to use:
Explain what the writer meant by…
Describe what was meant by…
Discuss the following concept…
Distinguish the following terms…
Restate in your own words…
Compare the following…
Predict what will happen next…
Put this in your own words…

In my next ezine, I’ll present a couple of ways to use questions like those above that will increase your effectiveness as a home school teacher.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

PS – Be sure to check out our new Becoming an Effective Writer Program on our home page. Take advantage of the free writing evaluation too!

If you care to comment or have a question about what I've written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to our website, www.basicskills.net

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This is the first in a series of articles in which I will briefly explain how you can expand your student's thinking and understanding by asking appropriate questions. A lot of this can be done orally so you can put it to use immediately. To help you remember and use the concepts I'm presenting, I'll be using a teaching pattern in which I will...

1. Present a concept

2. Give an example of it

3. Ask you a question that will require you to apply what you've learned

4. Let you know if your answer is correct

Let's get started.

There are six kinds of questions we often ask our children in order to check their understanding. These questions have often been represented by educators as a pyramid to suggest that some questions are harder to answer than others. Questions at the bottom are easier than questions at the top. While not a bad idea, I like to think of these questions as a series of steps, with the bottom step representing fact-type questions. These are the kinds of questions that dominate the tests you and I have used with our children over the years. These are the kinds of questions that, while often necessary, don't take our grasp of a subject to much more than a surface level. But, test publishers like these kinds of questions because they're easy to write, and we like them because they're easy to correct. And our children find knowledge-based tests unpleasant because they are often long, boring, and just plain mind-numbing.

These questions often start with the following phrases:

What happened when...

List the steps for...

Name the city where...

How long is a...

Who painted the...

Locate the rivers flowing from...

Write the formula used to solve...

State the rule that governs...

You get the idea. Being able to give the answers to questions that start like the above is evidence that a student knows something, but it does not mean he or she understands what they know.

I learned something a little over a week ago when my laptop died. Actually two things. Make that three. First, to avoid being totally stressed out, backing up your data regularly is essential (my last back up was done in July). Second, history repeats itself (this wasn't the first time I had a hard drive in a computer fail) and I failed to pay attention. Third, I learned a new term: Terabyte. That's the storage size of the backup device that now contains the data my computer- tech friend was able to salvage from my laptop.

So, to someone knowing the above, they would probably conclude that yes, I knew something (I had some facts), but didn't truly understand them, or at least act with understanding...

In my next ezine, I'll give you my "three D's" of presenting facts intelligently so that you'll be an even more effective home school teacher.

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

If you care to comment or have a question about what I've written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to our website, www.basicskills.net.

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FIVE REASONS WHY HOMESCHOOLERS RELUCTANTLY USE PUBLISHED TESTS (AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT)

Here are five reasons why we reluctantly use published tests and some follow-up responses.

Reason #1: We feel insecure. Even though home schooling has become more and more mainstream, we still realize we’re not trained professionals, and we don’t want to risk ruining our children’s education by trying something too “out of the box.” We play it safe and stay with the “tried and true.”

Response: Feeling insecure is normal when you don’t have the “proper papers.” While it seems to go away with time, it returns when our students enter their high school years. Years ago I began my teaching career in a private school without having completed my Bachelor of Arts Degree, let alone my teaching credential. I hoped my students’ parents would not ask about my university training, and when they did, I changed the subject as quickly as I could. As a non-degreed/certified teacher, my insecurities were eased by finding good teacher mentors to help me and give me feedback. Our high school diploma program was born out of such concerns. My recommendation is to seek out home school mentors.

Reason #2: We assume that book publishers know what they’re doing. We say to ourselves, they are the professionals, and we are just the laymen. They have the inside scoop on pedagogy, and we’re not even sure how to pronounce that word.

Response: Yes, professional educators and text book publishers do know things we don’t. My recommendation is to use the teacher guides that come with the textbooks. However, we need to see them as tools, not another set of the “Ten Commandments.” Many teacher guides were designed for teachers in classrooms of 25 plus students. Don’t minimize your own ability to improvise on a lesson. For most mothers, every day is a day of improvising, course correcting, and multi-tasking.

Reason #3: We tend to teach how we were taught, and we test the same way.

Response: …like we were taught, before Google. My recommendation is that for tests that are memory intensive and scheduled to be taken frequently, cut out some of the questions, maybe up to half. Which half you ask? The “footnote” questions, the ones you could only find the answer to if you spent a lot of time in the index of the book, the ones whose answers bear little significance to getting the main idea of the chapter or section—these all should get the ax! Again, our diploma program advisors walk their clients through this process.. Additionally, study sheets and oral reviews help students know what the test is targeting. More on this in an upcoming letter.

Reason #4: Published tests are easy to score. Simply bring out the answer key, and in minutes you’re done. Evaluating answers to essay questions is another story, and so we keep them to a minimum or exclude them altogether.

Response: True! I like tests that are fast and easy to score tests. We all experience time pressure. Tests that use primarily true-false, multiple choice, and matching items yield a quick score, and most students like their parents to tell them how they did in a reasonable amount of time. But, I’m suggesting we move away from tests in which seventy to eighty percent of the items are fact based. That means using questions that require the student write a paragraph or more to answer. How is this to be graded? I recommend using a point system to quantify answers. Here’s one way to do this:
When evaluating the student’s response to a question, award the following:

4-5 points for good to excellent answers
3-4 points for adequate answers
1-2 incomplete answers

Add up the number of points earned and divide it by the number points possible, and you’ll get a percent which you can use to justify a grade.

Reason #5: Publishers produce and sell what consumers buy, and we buy their tests.

Response: This is just simple economics. But what if you want to change how you measure understanding? As the saying goes, “You can’t be something with nothing.” Four different products we offer go beyond basic memorization. While they do involve some recitation of facts, they also include questions that require comprehension, the ability to analyze, and the ability to evaluate. If you’re curious about what this looks like, you can click the following links to see sample pages from some of our products:

From our Personal Finance product

From our Career Development product

From our Health Product

Asking questions that extend student’s thinking and understanding must be done intentionally. While it may be difficult and time consuming at first, with practice, it gets easier. In the next six articles I write, I’ll present and explain six levels of thinking that you can put to use immediately to check your student’s understanding beyond their ability to parrot facts back to you.

Until then, let us know of any subjects you’d like us to address in future letters.
Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

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PS – If you care to comment or have a question about what I’ve written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to www.basicskills.net.

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First, let me say that I’m not talking about achievement tests. There’s been some whining on the part of homeschool parents about being required to have their children take these tests. From some of the comments I’ve heard and read, you would get the idea that the stress created by this kind of testing results in widespread and almost irreversible harm both psychologically and emotionally. Please hold the drama…

What I’m talking about is a form of testing I’ve used, and one I suspect many of you have too that makes no sense at all.

Some publishers of home school textbooks still equate regurgitation with excellence in education. And because they do, students spend hours reading, looking up, and memorizing facts to get the “seal of approval”-- an “A” or “B” on a test. And the longer the test, the better, or so we’re led to believe.

For many students, the test is taken quickly, right after having taken a final look at their notes before they forget what they’ve “stuffed” in their head. Once examined, the data is dumped in order to make room for the next batch of information, and so the process repeats itself. Why do publishers continue to create these kinds of assessment tools, and why do we subject our kids them? What are we thinking? What should we be thinking?

First of all, technology has changed the way we “do life” and therefore what we assess and how we assess it needs to change too. Think about the following:

Want to apply for a job? Go online.

Looking for …? Try Craigs list.

Need directions? MapQuest it. Or, get a GPS.

Need to call a friend? Simply scroll through your cell phone’s address book and click.

Want to know how much you know? Spend hours memorizing and take a test ……..

“You’ve got to be kidding,” our children may be thinking (especially as they get older), but they, quietly or not so quietly, go along with the system, because we do.

We’ve got to face the fact that the way information is obtained, stored, and distributed has changed and continues to morph. Why commit to memorizing when in seconds you can Google the information you want? It’s at your finger tips on a desktop, laptop, or handheld device.

OK, just so it’s clear, I’m not totally down on memorization. It has its place. Just not eighty to ninety percent of the time. Elementary students should memorize math facts. Being able to recall the names of the parts of speech is essential to discussing the syntax of a sentence. Knowing key vocabulary terms facilitates communication in a variety of subjects. But again, with the technological advances we are seeing, we need to consider what we are asking our kids to memorize and if “instant retrieval” of these facts is all that important.

Why is it so hard to change from the status quo? And if we did, what would it look like? I’ll address these two questions in the next article.

Until then, please don’t hesitate to contact us for educational support and encouragement.

Curt Bumcrot, MRE
Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

Have a question or comment? Post it at our community forum.

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ARE YOU REALLY HOMESCHOOLING THIS YEAR?

Early on in the homeschool movement, virtually all academic instruction took place at home. After all, if you just took your kids out of school, where else would they be learning? This worked fine for all of us for awhile, and then a strange thing happened..............

Our kids grew up! And as this was happening, many of us became keenly aware of our own limitations to meet our children’s academic and social needs. We concluded that they would benefit from various learning settings and that someone else’s instruction, in addition to our own, could be a positive thing.

For those of you who started homeschooling five or ten years ago, the above may seem obvious. There are many support systems and services in place for you to use, and many of you do. But it wasn’t always this way.

Early on in the homeschool movement many states had laws prohibiting home education. Leaders of private schools opposed the movement and saw homeschoolers as a threat to their enrollment. One major Christian book publisher was so suspicious that they wouldn’t make their textbooks available to homeschoolers. Organizations or private schools caught making their textbooks available were threatened with having their accounts cancelled.

Here in Oregon, two main things characterized Basic Skills’ early work with homeschoolers in the 80’s and early 90’s.:

The children of the families we worked with were almost all elementary-age students, sixth grade on down. We worked with a few junior-high students and an occasional high schooler, but it was rare.

Because the laws regulating homeschooling in Oregon were vague and gave local superintendents virtually unlimited power over children in their district, the majority of our clients were schooling illegally. For practical purposes, they taught exclusively at home so they wouldn’t risk exposure and be reported.

But like I said, our kids were growing up. What we realized was that as parents, we had various interests and expertise’s that could be used for the benefit of each other’s children. So, as the laws regulating homeschooling around the nation were re-written, and homeschooling became more mainstream, many of us made changes in the way we homeschooled as well.

One of my clients was a micro-biologist and taught a Biology class. Another parent had spent years working up a literature curriculum for her children and began teaching it to others. Various hands-on courses in art and writing emerged.

We were helping each other and each other’s children’s education. Families partnered together, classes were held, and homeschooling ceased to be restricted to the home. And then question surfaced, “Are you really homeschooling?”

Behind the question was the not-so-veiled implication that we had somehow strayed from the “pure” path of the “Biblical” command that families do it all, or most of the teaching.

“Real” homeschoolers do it this way kind of thinking…

Some leaders wondered if we were sinning by what we were doing… and they weren’t kidding.

To distinguish “us” from “them”, one major homeschool organization tried to help us out. To participate in their national event, a standard was set. It went like this, 51% (or a percent close to this) of your student’s homeschooling had to take place at home. Anything less than this was, well, not really homeschooling… and you couldn’t be a part of “us.”

Thanks for helping us figure it out.

I know that to many of you this sounds ridiculous.

But here’s my point. Whatever educational choices you make this school year, they don’t belong to the person who introduced you to homeschooling, a support group leader, or a speaker who spoke at a conference you attended. They belong to you. In esteeming our leaders too much, many of us have surrendered our educational freedom.

And so, it’s time to reclaim it.

If the popular curriculum you chose isn’t working for you, change it.

Want to be part of a co-op? Go ahead.

Want to earn a diploma through an extension school, correspondence school, or diploma program like ours? Fill out the application.

The choice is yours.

And maybe the best answer to the question, “Are you really homeschooling?” should be another question like “Why do you care so much?”

Have a great school year.

Curt

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Have a question or comment? Post it at our community forum.

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The Science of Homeschool
by Jerry Jones

The Egg and I.  For several years we had a poultry enclosure at the back of our yard in the city; with a duck pond and a chicken coop!  It just sort of “grew” out a homeschool project.  We weren’t even thinking “experiment” at the time.  Our family innocently read a 4H pamphlet about how easy it is to raise chickens.  We obtained an incubator, bought a dozen fertilized eggs, started turning eggs every twelve hours, worried they would never hatch, and then as eggshells started fracturing, worried they would die.  Before long, we had to create a backyard chick-zone that was safe from larger critters and pets.  Over the months, we tried several kinds of shelters, poultry feed, and water delivery systems. Besides providing us a steady supply of eggs, the hens inspired a very productive garden. We thought we would learn a bit about hatching eggs, but ended up with much more, including a tremendous appreciation for what God has made, and for the people who do this for a living.  By actually trying it ourselves, an experiment became an unforgettable experience. It was real science. The science of homeschool.

Before Textbooks.  I have come to believe that Adam was the original scientist.  He was busy right from the start, conducting experiments, making observations, and giving names to creatures.  Would it be going too far to say that the Lord made us all to be scientists?  Homeschools have always been around, since long before printing presses.  It’s easy to think nowadays that everything necessary to a good education is between the covers of a textbook; but for the great majority of history, learning was a combination of conversation and application.  Books are very valuable resources, but they should never replace the laboratory of living.  That’s the science of homeschool.

The Permanence of Discovery.  Why do we draw and paint in art class?  Why do we  make a cake in home economics?  In any kind of learning, there is a deeper kind of understanding that takes place in the doing.  In science we call it experimentation.  Trying things and making our own observations are the keys to science.  The best learning results from personal discovery.  To read about volcanoes is fine, but to build a volcano and make it erupt, is tangible learning! To hear that a butterfly comes from a chrysalis is a wonderful piece of information, but it’s nothing compared with hatching your own and seeing a butterfly emerge and stretch and take flight! In the laboratory of life, the scripture says to, “taste, and see that the Lord is good.” All people discover by doing – through both trial and error!  And what we discover, we remember.  And what we remember, we can apply to new experiences throughout our lives. That’s the science of homeschool.

Be Amazed.  Rather than shy away from teaching science (because we are not strong in that subject, or because we associate science with a secular world view) we ought to welcome the opportunity to let God teach us and our children together about the wonders of His creative genius.  Science makes us see the bigger picture.  The more you study it, the more you see the purposefulness of the Creator and Sustainer of all things.  It is important that homeschoolers have a hands-on experience.  When we look closer at what God has given us, it heightens our appreciation of Him.  We need to become awestruck, captivated, and incredibly thankful. That’s the science of homeschool.

Doers of the Word.  The Bible speaks of parents teaching at all times and in every context (Deuteronomy 6).  Jesus was very clear about putting what we learn into practice.  The same applies to the homeschool student.  Math learned without practical application is math forgotten.  Studying geology by only looking at pictures of rocks just isn’t very meaningful.  A young person may study a driver’s manual, and pass the test with flying colors, but then there needs to be some supervised “laboratory” experience.  That’s the difference between homeschoolers who only read about science, and those who do science.  Science is action -- it’s never static, it is always dynamic, a process. Applying is learning. That’s the science of homeschool.

Passion.  I feel passionately about this, because when I was a young science student,  I learned a lot of facts, but what influenced me most was the classroom experiments --  the times when I could be a scientist, make discoveries, and apply them to my life.  Now I teach science and math, and there is tremendous fulfillment when I see the light of discovery in the eyes of my students, when an idea becomes reality for them.  That’s why I try to provide as many laboratory applications as is possible. I want my classes to provide those lasting memories that give life to learning. That’s the science of homeschool.

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Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Practice makes perfect. Of course, everybody knows this. I know I've heard it, believed it, told others, but it's not really true. Actually, it's more accurate to say that perfect practice makes perfect and at least relatively permanent. When it comes to writing, it is not uncommon for students to make the same mistakes over and over again. They "practice" the same errors, because they did not receive adequate explanation and subsequent practice in the first place. Junior and senior high school students often write inconsistently having never really understood how and when to use many of the punctuation and capitalization rules necessary for accurate and successful written communication.

The Mastering Punctuation series has been designed to help students learn and apply punctuation and capitalization rules to everyday writing. The end result is written communication that is clear, concise, and effective. And now, after a long wait for many of you, Mastering Punctuation Book 2 is being released. You can read a review of it on our home page at www.basicskills.net. To get a feel for the format of the student book, and to see and download the first week's worth of lessons, click here.

Mastering Punctuation Book 2, like the first book, is available in both paper back and e-book versions. At $18.00, the E-Book version of Mastering Punctuation Book 2 is a great value. You can print select pages again and again as needed for review and practice, plus it can be used indefinitely for all family members. Of course, if you order the paper back version at $25.00 (includes shipping and handling), it may also be copied indefinitely for family use.

Best wishes as you begin this school year!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

Director, Basic Skills Assessment & Educational Services

PS – If you care to comment or have a question about what I’ve written above, please visit our Community Forum to respond. Please feel free to forward this to home schoolers you think would benefit. Also, you have permission to copy this article to your blogs, forums, social network pages, or other websites. We only ask that you provide the live link at the bottom of the article that leads back to www.basicskills.net.