Homeschool World Forum

[kkapfe]

Here's a question for anyone who does unit studies...how do you keep track of grades and such when a lot of subjects are combined? My daughters and I just started doing unit studies after doing 2 and 1/2 school quarters of traditional textbook-type studies. We use Homeschool Tracker software that we downloaded free off the internet. It works great for homeschoolers who do each subject individually but not so great for those who do unit studies and combine things like Handwriting and social studies or science. Are there any programs out there that work well with unit studies, other than just writing it down on pen and paper?? I'm hoping to find an easy way to track their grades!

[elliemaejune]

You can keep track of achievement for things like English and math pretty easily--those are not usually covered in a unit study--but for the things covered by the unit study, I would probably just give my dc A's, or S's (Satisfactory) or something along those lines.

Of course, it would help if we knew how old your dc are and which unit study you're using.

[Theodore]

Just estimate how much emphasis you put on each subject and calculate hours based on that percentage of total unit study time. For instance, if you covered two subjects over 5 hours, but you figure you emphasized one a bit more than the other, you could arbitrarily choose 40% for one and 60% for the other, or 2 hours and 3 hours.

Record-keeping is just your best estimate, it doesn't have to be exactly right every time or the state comes and shoots you
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[kkapfe]

My daughters are 7 and 5, so first grade and kindergarten. We are doing a unit study that I am creating based off our vacation to DisneyWorld. It's a spin off of the "It's A Small World" ride and all the countries we "visited" at the Epcot park. Right now we're studying China which means that we're doing crafts about Chinese New Year, learning about Chinese inventions like the kite and umbrella, learning about animals from China, and reading books either non-fiction about China itself or fiction based on on people or animals from China. We're having so much fun with it. We actually get most everything in the unit study except for math and spelling (which we do differently because my daugter LOVES how we use www.spellingtime.com).

I understand about estimating the time spent. I just worry about overestimating or underestimating. It would be so much easier to just say..."This is what we did today" instead of worrying about how many hours we logged this week.