Half-year home ed quiz and review

I have been reviewing what we have covered in the past six months recently in order to put together a half-year quiz for Harry. We did this at Christmas too and he loved it. His recall isn't great so this is a good, fun way to practise and it allows me to take stock of what has been done. Often, this is more than anticipated, which I expect is the case for a lot of home educators where learning can become a natural process and you are not always trying to meet targets and tick boxes.

We cover subjects in different ways. I noticed that most of the geography topics were part of projects looking at major events - the World Cup, Winter Olympics and Chinese New Year, whereas English has mainly been workbook based. We do lots of hands-on science both alone and with friends and group history workshops led by third parties with other home educating families. This variety suits us and means that if a particular approach isn't working, we can fall back on other activities.

I went through my blog and chose some major areas to cover, which we did using quick-fire factual questions. This is how it was broken down:

English and art

Nouns, verbs and adjectives

Question marks and question words 

Apostrophes

Vowels

Plurals

The art of Matisse and Van Gogh 

Spelling 

Harry spelled forty words from the dolch lists by writing half and telling me half verbally. This area has improved a lot this year. We only started doing spelling in January and he couldn't spell simple words like 'with' but he hardly struggled with these words. I chose middle-difficulty words for him such as 'they' and 'every' and we will continue to work on this so he can feel confident when writing himself.

Maths

Units of measurement - ml, cm, degrees, grams

Right angles

Fractions - quarter, half and third

Rounding

Symmetry

Horizontal, vertical and parallel lines

3D shapes

Identifying the biggest number using numbers in tens of thousands

Days in a week and months in a year

Bar charts

We also practised the 2-6 times tables by rolling a ball to each other and saying them in turn

History

Ancient Egypt

Famous volcanic eruptions

Tudors

Great Fire of London

World War I

Science

Viscosity

Forces - gravity, friction, air resistance

Electricity - conductor vs insulator

States of matter

Solubility

Space - planet facts, constellations

Adaptation and food chains

Human body - organs, skeleton

Geography

Oceans

Russia

China

Brazil

Landmarks - Taj Mahal, Sistine Chapel

I don't think we will be starting anything new in August which will give me chance to get some advance preparation done for Autumn. We will continue to read and play games at home of course. We have a very busy period coming up: Harry is taking part in several summer holiday sports camps and swimming lessons which will tire him out, we have a family wedding, cousins visiting and a camping weekend and we would like to make the most of the summer weather and special summer holiday events too.