The Independent Student
The Middle School Years
I have waited and prepared for this moment. Let me describe it to you. I am asleep in bed, while my eight year old son in 5th grade, who gets up before everyone, goes downstairs reviews his To Do list and gets all of his schoolwork done without me helping or pushing him to do it. Later that day, I review what he has done. I talk to him about any corrections. If I think he is ready, I spend 5 minutes max teaching him his next new concept. Then we are all done with book work for the day! My son is becoming an independent student and soon he will have the skills to review teaching resources by himself and move himself forward on the next objective. My goal is by the time he is in high school, he will be a fully independent learner!
One big component of the 5-Minute Homeschool is fostering independence in study skills. I want my children to know how to organize themselves, set learning goals, manage their time, and use effective study habits to learn anything they want or need to learn without me spoon-feeding it to them. But, I know this goal will not happen overnight. It takes years to develop those skills, but I start immediately when they are four years old to give them little opportunities to do their assigned tasks by themselves after practicing it many times in my presence. If you make sure in The 5-Minute Homeschool that your child at the very least really masters the foundational skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, by the middle school years, your child should be transitioning into the next phase of academic development - The Independent Student.
One big component of the 5-Minute Homeschool is fostering independence in study skills. I want my children to know how to organize themselves, set learning goals, manage their time, and use effective study habits to learn anything they want or need to learn without me spoon-feeding it to them. But, I know this goal will not happen overnight. It takes years to develop those skills, but I start immediately when they are four years old to give them little opportunities to do their assigned tasks by themselves after practicing it many times in my presence. If you make sure in The 5-Minute Homeschool that your child at the very least really masters the foundational skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, by the middle school years, your child should be transitioning into the next phase of academic development - The Independent Student.
What is The Independent Student?
Aside from mastery of foundational knowledge and skills, one big characteristic of successful students is having effective study habits. After making sure they understand new information, they know how to transfer new knowledge and skills into long-term memory by themselves. They also can distinguish information as essential versus extraneous, fact versus opinion, foundational versus more complex. Teaching your student effective study skills is the goal of The Independent Student. It is the transition between The 5-Minute Homeschool and The Independent Learner. Let's see how we accomplish this awesome feat!
Science and Social Studies
Math
Reading
TO BE CONTINUED...
Science and Social Studies
- No longer am I driven by content standards. Rather, I focus on study skill objectives.
- I order study skill objectives from foundational to more complex.
- All assignments have a general repeatable step-by-step format that practice study skills with the content standards. The goal of assignments is to make steady progress in mastering study skills.
- To make sure we do actually learn the the most critical state content standards, I condense and reorganize the standards of learning for ALL the middle school years into a year-long focus that we will revisit each grade of middle school.
- I help my student understand how their right or left brain dominance affects their learning needs, what is their preferred learning style, and how to manage their time and organize their space.
- Within the context of a student's preferred learning style, study skills include previewing new information, engaging with the teacher's presentation, processing new vocabulary, identifying and troubleshooting sticking points of understanding, organizing information, reviewing or practicing new information, and memory techniques.
Math
- Learning objectives are again ordered from more simple to more complex if they are not already structured that way.
- I continue to practice The 5-Minute Homeschool principles of achieving master and automatic retrieval BEFORE moving on to the next learning objective.
- As far as study skills, the focus is engaging the teacher's presentation, identifying and troubleshooting sticking points of understanding, organizing rules for efficient memorization, maintaining neatness, showing all steps, anticipating points of potential error and habitual review of work for accuracy.
Reading
TO BE CONTINUED...
How do repeatable, generalized assignments support how the brain learns?
Many of us went through school being told, "Study for that test," but nobody ever taught us HOW to study. This is why in the 5-Minute Homeschool, we focus on generalized assignments that actually practice key study skills. Empowering students with a repeatable step-by-step process gives them the opportunity to master skills and tools that they can then apply to a new concept. It also makes your job so much easier, as you are not coming up with new assignments all the time or having to walk your child through how to approach each different assignment. And again, this model supports how the brain wants to learn. By putting a repeatable process in long term memory, then a student can effectively focus on applying that process to a new and different situation. Below are some examples of repeatable study processes that can be applied to different topics within a subject.