Piney Woods Homeschool

I am no expert at writing exam questions, but I'll post these just to give an example of the sort of open-ended questions you might use. Year 1, Term 3 History Tell a story about King Alfred. Tell about Edmund Ironside and Canute. How did Harald marry Gyda? What did Buffalo Bill do that was so amazing? Geography Name one of the Great Lakes and tell what it looks like. Explain how a lock works. Science Tell all you know about two different birds (cardinal, catbird, rose-breasted grosbeak, scarlet tanager, brown thrasher, mockingbird, thrush, linnet, goldfinch, tree sparrow, junco). Literature What poor choices did King Lear make?  What happened because of them? How did the cat in Just So Stories manage to be allowed to live in the cave? Year 4, Term 3 History Explain the importance of either John Newton or David Brainerd. How was the French Revolution different from the American Revolution? Tell all you can remember about one of the battles of the American Re...

I just now realized that I wasn't getting emails when comments were left here, so I apologize for ignoring everyone's comments for so long!  I'll try to stay on top of them now.

This year my oldest was in Year 4 and working fairly independently.  Because in Year 4 the AO schedule has a more complicated reading schedule than in the past, I had to modify our schedule to accommodate that, and I had to find a system that let my dd work independently while making sure she completed her work well. We still used the chart format schedules (new, up-to-date versions soon to be available on the AmblesideOnline website ).  I edited the chart to reflect the additional work I wanted us to be sure to get done and also to reflect our choices when more than one option was provided.  I added checkboxes to items that must occur more than once a week.  I then organized the various rows of once-a-week work into categories, each category containing approximately four or five assignments.  The categories were chosen to group work of similar difficulty together.  Each day, dd must do all the daily items, plus one from each category.  That way,...