We’ve been homeschooling for two years (my daughter is in the 9th grade) with the Abeka video curriculum. Because of Hurricane Katrina, we got off to a very late start this year, and my daughter is trying to catch up now so she’ll still have plenty of free time this summer. She’s going to a worship conference, youth camp, and to Disney with friends and I don’t want her to miss any of that, but at the same time I need her to get finished with school as quickly as possible. The regular-school kids around here just didn’t cover the whole curriculum but I’m not willing for her to skip anything academic.
She’s taking extra classes every day but she also thought it might be faster to just take whole days on just one subject, taking about ten classes. (She fast-forwards through the chit-chat which is a real time saver.) No wasted time switching books and DVDs, no trying to remember what she did the day before, just get through it. Anybody else out there done this? And if so, did your kids retain as much of the information as they normally do?
Actually, that is a pretty good idea. I do not use this curriculum so cannot speak to it specifically, but when I was in my teacher education program, we studied block scheduling a bit. One of the features of this structure is spending more time in each subject to really get into it without wasting class time. Students retain more as well. All the research I’ve seen has shown this as a postivie alternative to the traditional structure of the school day.
My instinct (with a touch of research) says your daughter will retain more, because it won’t be broken up and interrupted as much.
Well, she’s trying it – so far so good but I guess we’ll see come test-time how it worked out. At any rate, I don’t think it will be any worse than the rest of the kids around here who just didn’t cover three months worth of material and still received passing grades. :-/