I do. I don't grade daily work, although I do check it and discuss it with them. I grade and record quizzes and tests and sometimes special assignments like reports. I make each student an individual report card based on which subjects they're doing, and I send the report cards home every 20 school days. (It was a compromise with the public school schedule most of them are used to. Whether 6-weeks or 9-weeks, they send home a progress report halfway through, so every 3 weeks or at 4.5 weeks. I figured every 20 school days was about right and easy to keep track of.) I start report cards in first grade, although some subjects in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are graded with S/N/U. Everything else is graded with percent scores, not letter grades.
I will be slowly starting to add more "test" subject with my upcoming middle school child. The goal is by high school she will be comfortable testing in all subjects. For High School I grade tests, quizzes, reports, essays, labs and any projects they might do. The weight of each assignment in the grading process depends upon the particular course. For science test are normally 70% and labs are 30% of the grade. For English I might do 20% vocabulary, 40% tests, 40% essays depending on the course work. As for giving rewards I will usually reward a test of 100%, it could be something as simple as lunch out or being able to rent a movie they wanted to see. I try to do something to make it special.
I only grade for 9th through 12th for transcript purposes. In some subjects, the only possible grade is an A, because I teach for mastery and not just to get it done. If it's not mastered to an "A" level, then we do it again until it is. By 9th grade, we are slowly integrating outside classes through co-op or online sources, so grades come from there as well. You could just mark it Pass or Fail, but then you might have trouble with applying the colleges; they like to be able to calculate a GPA so they can fill in that blank on the standard forms.
I will for my fourth grader sometimes because when he sees his paper with over half the problems incorrect he doesn't care. If I put a percentage and letter grade on same paper, he cares enough to correct his mistakes. Must be his public school training. Whatever works to get him to work more carefully, I guess.:roll:
I do for my high schooler. It's sort of required for us for our Diploma program. I grade based on effort as well as performance. Sometimes, you can study and do everything that you're supposed to do, and it still doesn't turn out well. So, I do grade on how much effort was put into something. Well, except for the "gradeables" like Math. No way to really quantify effort. And I do make her go back and correct something that's wrong. I feel that is important. My youngest, no grades except for the things that are, again, gradeable like math, spelling, etc. My middle, same thing. But I don't grade things that can't be quantified. They know what effort is expected. Does that make sense?
I don't do any grades at all for either of my kids who are 11 and 13 years old. We don't really do grade levels and have never done letter grades since homeschooling.But that's also because they don't really sit down and work on individual "subjects"...instead, it's all integrated and I am too lazy to figure out what would constitute as science, math, history, grammar, etc!
Since I teach drafting online, I do grade each drawing and give 100% when students have their work completely correct. Once they have everything corrected, they can move to the next lesson. What better way to learn the subject matter then learning from your mistakes? Mike & Mary Murray Homeschoolingus.com
No. I think that defeats the purpose of education. Grades are for schools where they just need to churn them out, and quality does not matter, they cannot linger on anything, they have to move them on. In those cases, give a measure and send them off. At home, learning something to 70% is not acceptable. Either you learned it, or you did not. But we are not moving on with some deadline or minimum state test standard. Our standards are much higher. And you either completed, or not.
I started giving grades for my DS when we brought him home for school for 5th grade, because that was just the mindset at the time, and the curriculum had the tests/quizzes in place. It just sort of came natural. With DGS (3rd grade), who has only been to public kindy and a few weeks of first grade before schooling with Grandma, I'm finding that if he doesn't do well on a quiz, he actually tries harder. He likes doing well and grades give him a "measuring stick" that's better than Grandma saying "good job".
I will say, having had one graduate and another that will be graduating very soon, that giving grades in high school as you go is MUCH easier than trying to figure out accurate transcripts after four years!
Yes, I started giving grades for some subjects in 7th grade and now that mine are in high school, I give grades for every subject so I will have something for transcripts. We don't really reward for good grades, we just expect them to do their best.
