I have been thinking lately (although a lot of people are probably ahead of me in this) that I could assign my son a paper to write over a certain subject, for instance-history. Well, why can't I count that as history and English. And, if I grade, give him a grade in both classes. It seems that it wouldn't be "cheating" and since I am homeschooling-then I would be able to evaluate both aspects of the work. Check for the spelling and sentence structure, etc. for English. Then check the information for the history. Do any of you guys do this? It seems that there are other ways of doing this too. If we cook a meal from another country (geography), then it could also count towards home ec. or living skills. Part of me feels like it is wrong, but I believe that is my public school upbringing talking to me--so I will just ignore that.:lol:!! My son does not do well with a large academic work load, so I feel this may be ONE way to learn a lot without an overload.:!:
Rachael is taking Notgrass World History this year. It specifically says that it should be counted as one credit World History, one credit World Literature, and one credit Bible. I have NO PROBLEM AT ALL with counting a report as both History and Compostion! (I might add that in college, I had a class that required we read/write up an article each week. The next quarter, I had a totally different class that also wanted this; yep, I turned in some of the articles I had done the quarter before!)
Good for you Jackie and thank you for your response, it makes sense. If he is learning how to write, why should it have to be seperate from other learning. Maybe subjects shouldn't be divided the way they are.
Actually, it's got a fancy name in educational circles. They refer to it as "integrated curriculum", the idea that the classes shouldn't be seperate (since life isn't seperated out). Trouble is, it's hard to do with high school, when you're dealing with a dozen different teachers. Some classes, such as history/language or math/science, leads to it easier than others.
When I was in 11th grade (public school), we had a MAJOR paper due at the end of the term that was for both English and History (20 pages). I went to an outcomes based education school (for those who know what that is) and our final projects/papers were our entire grade for that subject. The upside was that we only had the one paper to do, the downside was that if we didn't do so well on it, we did poorly in two classes instead of just one.
Yep, btdt! As Jackie said, it's a bit harder in highschool, but you can combine all sorts of things in gradeschool and Junior high!
When I was in 1st grade (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), we were given assignments that were each a paragraph to copy from the board that were about a particular topic (a couple a week, as I recall). We got instructed on how to center the title, indent the paragraph, leave a margin, space the words, print neatly, and we discussed the topic (say, health for example). Then after we'd copied it, we drew a picture (it was that horizontal paper with wide lines and a good-sized space without lines for drawing the pictures on). When we'd done all the topics, we'd put them together into books, with construction paper covers which we illustrated too. We got a language arts lesson, handwriting lesson, health lesson, and an art lesson, with four separate grades. Nowadays in public school, they'd have to do four separate lessons, all of them on workbook pages or xeroxed handout sheets, "for accountability". And they call that "progress in education".
I think it sounds great! I thought about something like that. My daughter loves space so I thought doing something about history having to do with space (history & science) and writing a paper on it (english)
Since I was a double major in college, I had to take a research class, involving a full research project, for both of my majors. I did it and turned it in for the first research class. I took the other research class the next semster, tweaked the project/paper and turned it in again.
We often combine English and History. When they have to write an essay for History, I count the formatting, structure, spelling etc as an English evaluation, and the actual content as a History evaluation. It does usually require an extra draft, so make sure you warn them that you'll be marking it for English too !
This is exactly what our children had to do in private school. Each year, the English and history teachers got together and assigned a joint project to their respective classes.
They did this at the public middle school for 6th grade...the kids picked a country and then wrote a report...They worked on it in English and in History. So like everyone says...It is not cheating.
When my son was in ps (6th and 7th grade), the whole jr. high worked together on science fair. Science was obvious, LA was research and report writing, math was processing your data and making sense of it, art was their fair boards...the only thing I can't remember how they tied it in was history/geo. In college they called it interdisciplinary classes and you were required to take a certain number of them to graduate (liberal arts college). I'm thinking of doing more of this kind of approach myself. Ds13 is bogged down with what we are doing right now. (SOS) Great for my lazy self with grade tracking, but not great for him who has so many probing questions that it isn't working to have self-guided studies.
Brooke-- My son has been bogged down and crushed and turned off to anything educational, so I knew I needed to change. What good would it do to "educate" him only to have him hate it and not really learn at all! I used to think the pre-packaged curriculum was the key, but now I know that is not true (at least in most cases IMO). There are two good things about this. One-my son can read living books and enjoy different types of learning. Two-it will be a lot cheaper!!!
