How bad do you feel about not finishing a curriculum or a workbook and just calling it good for the year? And by not finishing it mean doing most of it but just not every single page. Does this feeling go away after a few more years of homeschooling or will I have it for the rest of our schooling career??
I don't. I've been a classroom teacher, and very often THEY don't finish the books, either! LET IT GO! Did he learn? Are you pleased with what he learned? Is it absolutely necessary to get it ALL done? Sometimes, depeding on what it is, I will make them finish over the summer. But usually that's because I feel it must be done to continue on something else I want to do in the fall.
@Jackie thank you for posting that I was going to say awful but then like you said I am pretty pleased with all they learned this past year.
All I can say about not finishing everything in our books, is that I skipped things that I didn't feel was important. I felt like it was more busy work. I remember when my kids came home at the end of the school year and the books were about 3/4 or less done. I would ask what the heck happened here. But, when my kids tested this year and being out of ps they scored so much higher on their state exam it was mind boggling.
I'm just OCD enough that I realllllllly like to cross all the ts and dot all the is and finish all the pages/lessons. My reasoning is that it must be important enough to learn it if it was included in the book/course! When I have kids returning to my little class the following year, we'll just pick up where we left off (if there are whole chapters or units not done yet) and finish before starting the next level. Sometimes we just skim or skip the relatively less-important stuff in order to complete what I consider more important by the end of the year. If they're not returning, then I can't do a thing in the world about it and have to let it go.
It really bothered me at first but then someone asked me the same question - "Do you ever remember finishing the book in school?" and my honest answer was no. Also I found some of ds's workbooks just pounded some things to death (therefore I'd skip some pages) and with other things I found myself supplementing because I thought a concept was skimmed over. I agree with do you feel he understood the concept and are you please with his comprehension.
Nope, I don't feel bad for not finishing everything. One reason is that even the ps doesn't complete whole textbooks and the other reason is the following years curriculum will review the previous year anyway. I figure they'll get exposed to it all at some point.
It depends. If we are near the end of a book and I want to continue to use that program I'll have my child finish it. If we are going to use another program we won't finish it.
I use to feel like it was necessary to finish the books, because I paid for them, and I wanted to get every last penny's worth of learning out of them! Now, however, most of the curriculum has been used once by my oldest. I feel that I got my money's worth out of them once, so I'm not so uptight about making my middle child see every page and do every problem. By the time my youngest gets to it, I'll probably just flip through it and pick out the good parts!:lol:
Used to bug me to no end. After 7 years, though...there's just some stuff you don't get to! LOL Don't worry, it all gets repeated...over and over and over. A LOT of curriculums spend the last chapter or two of the book, etc. as review anyway. I say - be done!
We skip a lot of things. Especially if he knows it already. I think school repeats itself anyway. DS's science book just talked about rocks AGAIN. He learned about them in 3rd grade, then again in 4th and here it is showing up in 5th. Same information. So I asked him to tell me about it, he did and we skipped all 30 pages of it.
I had a problem with it until I recently had it make a home in my brain that the last few chapters are review, and I know that my kids know the stuff. And the first few chapters of the next year is a review of the last year. Since we don't take months off at a time they do not forget like the other kids, so that much review is not needed.
This is us, as well. I skip around a LOT. I make my curric work for me, so if I think it's useless busywork, the kids don't do it. For example: I spent a week teaching my daughter place value. She did 3 days with the blocks, and begged not to use them. Since she got it, I let her do without. This coming year, we have another chapter on place value. I'll have her do the first page or two to refresh her memory, then we'll skip to the next chapter. I also discovered our math book covers stuff in the last chapter that I don't care about them knowing. Sort of.. tacked on by the author to meet some sort of regulation, but nothing I care about (prob. and statistics for first graders, for instance). Now- I DID have a twinge of guilt about our sci book (which are lovely to look at). But when I realized we would be repeating the same information this year.... well. We will be doing the chapters we missed anyway. I don't know if it will all bite me in the bottom further down the road or not, but so far my kids seem to be getting it without the crazy repeats, so we're stickin' to it.
As far as biting you further down, that might depend on your child. But I did that with Rachael, and she scored high on her ACT test. So if there were any bites, it was more of a little annoying mosquito, rather than a serious need stitches dog attack!
OH, I have been stressing about the same thing. We did so many other activities and stuff that we still have a lot left in the curriculum I have. I have been debating what to do. I used Mcruffy and since I think I'm going to use it again for reading/language arts/spelling, I am thinking I should finish. As for math, I don't know. I guess I've been afraid that we'll be missing something. In other words, I'm just like you and still stressing over what to do.
We do not always complete every book. I haven't noticed any problems with it considering that many subjects cover the same thing the beginning of the following year and also through the year.
