Sunday 20 July 2014

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.

4 comments:

  1. I'm always surprised by how much we have actually done as well. I keep meaning to do this and I must set a day aside soon to review everything we have covered.
    I'm probably being a bit thick but what is the word list to which you refer? I have several lists but I wonder where you got yours from.
    Thank you for linking up this week:)

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  2. http://www.dolchsightwords.org
    These are the Dolch words - 220 'sight' words used frequently in children's literature. I thought that would give us a good starting point!

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  3. This review is a really good idea! You have covered an amazing amount of topics.

    And I had never heard of the Dolch list either - I'll have a look.

    Great post, thanks.

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