How can we help our students become more efficient learners?

[Kathy in MD]

A recent thread was asking if her high schooler's schedule was too demanding because of the lack of free time. That got me to thinking. What can we do to help our students learn efficiently so they can cover/master the amount of material yet still have unstructured time?

A couple of ideas I had was a speed reading course and having student read or watch videos on unfamiliar subjects the summer before just to become familair with the terminology or basic framework.

Do you have any other suggestions? How to memorize new material faster? How to master concepts? How to???????

[LisaNY]

Kathy, I'd have every high-school student read TWEM. She offers so many solid ideas on how to read and study books. Chapter 2 speaks specifically about speed-reading.

[Sharon in MD]

Our ds is really bad about not realizing how much time has passed or how much time he has "lost." So we got a day timer for him and he basically started clocking in his subjects. It has helped him quite a bit.

For reading, he usually uses and index card or piece of folded black paper to help him track down a page more quickly.

One of the pit falls of homeschooling for us has been the ease with which we can be distracted by getting up to go get a drink or let the cat out/in etc. It is amazing to me how much time we always seem to loose because we don't stay in our seats. So, learning to get your drink refilled and not getting back up for the next 45 min or 1 hour really helps.

These may seem really basic or even remedial, but they make a difference around here.

[mcconnellboys]

I think using WTM suggestions such as How to Read a Book; using a great books study, such as WEM; perhaps using SWB's book on Ancient history when you cover that time period; and even adding speed reading, if you feel it's needed, are all ideas for making the most of your high school time.

For my older son, just the daily practice of reading year in and out left him able to consistently cover about 50 pages per hour, and even in more difficult books about 30 pages per hour, so I didn't feel the need for speed reading, per se. I think that when we homeschoolers do high school, we do it to much greater depth and breadth than an organized school. I think that for many of us, we could certainly cut back, perhaps even in half, what we do in the course of a year with our children in any given subject and still be accomplishing more than what occurs in a school setting. Getting ourselves to do that, however, might be another matter, LOL!

I think many of us want that academic excellence that we feel was missing from our own educations and maybe tend to cram in as much learning in the course of a year as we can. That said, if a child is feeling stressed and in need of more free time, then I think as a teen, they can help find ways to pare down and streamline their days (and a planner, as someone else suggested, may be one help point for this).

For my older son, even though I built in homework and had him doing way too much stuff for one year as a ninth grader, most days he was finished with his work by 5 or before. That left evenings free for other activities (and he also still did some things outside the house on most days, too, such as a coop, theatre group, etc.) Getting input from your child about what things they really love and what things they'd like to cut might help you to see how you could reorganize their days. During our last two years at home, I allowed my son to slack in writing at home because he had more outside writing opportunities one year, and to slack in grammar and vocab the next because he had a college level lit class.

Now that he's back in private school, he constantly critiques the classes based on what we did at home and finds them lacking. At some times of the year, he's very busy and stressed; at other times, there seems to be absolutely nothing going on and he's bored and he can't redistribute the work more evenly over the course of the year or have any control of how it falls - such is the frustration of organized school. At least having learned organization of time a little at home has helped him to make a plan for whatever comes down the pike and have an idea of how long different projects, reading, etc. will take.

The beauty of homsechooling is that you can not only maximize your time, but also fit your education into your life so that you can feel you have enough time to pursue your interests. Beginning to get some of those high school requirements out of the way in junior high should allow more time to specialize and focus in senior high. And should also allow more free time.

People constantly question whether this will "count". If you're hsing all the way through high school, you can choose to make a yearless transcript showing classes completed and assigning credits for those. It should make no difference whatsoever whether you were "officially" a seventh grade age when you completed a high school level language, history, PE, or any other class. If it's high school level work, it's high school level work.

Even in putting my child back into private school, I created a yearless transcript and they picked up required credits from across all three years that I listed. I told them that we had accelerated him (I had intended that he go on campus somewhere this past year, or next) and then he decided that he wanted to drop back to his normal age group. Kids here regularly take math, foreign language, and other courses in public middle school, then test into upper level courses for high school so that they will have a chance to take more AP classes.

Now, interestingly, an AP class is a high school level class that purports to be equal to a freshman college level course. If a child takes a test at the end of it and passes, they get credit for the freshman level of that college course and go into college at a higher level. Why would it be that a high school age child can take a college level course, but a middle school age child can't complete high school level work? That has never made any sense to me whatsoever and is just a part of the bureaucracy of high schools trying to maintain their territory, in my opinion. (Similarly, here where I live, they won't give equal credit for dual credit college courses and AP courses. They get no dollars if a child goes outside their system to take a *real* college course, but they do get money for AP classes, so they discourage kids from taking actual college courses....)

If my child is taking an actual college class in seventh or eighth grade, why would that not be comparable (and chances are, he's following the more rigorous college semester schedule, too, rather than stretching the class out over an entire year)? Similarly, if he's using a high school or college level text to cover a math or science text at this age, then he's doing high school level work and should be getting high school level credit for it.

My plan for my own older son would have allowed him to begin to specialize in his areas of interest more for the senior high years because other graduation requirements had been gotten out of the way already. Even with him back in private school and his options more limited, he will be able to focus more on his interests at least during his senior year (and he'll still have several dual credits or AP classes in the mix, too). So I still encourage folks who plan on hsing all the way to make use of the junior high time (7,8,9th grades) to move out of the way some of the simpler graduation requirements, allowing their children to study what they love more in senior high and making for perhaps a more relaxed schedule, more time for work if they want that, etc.