Workbooks as Year End Testing

With our last half of our 2012-2013 being more un-schooling than anything else, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when this weekend I told Builder Boy he was finished with 1st grade and was going to be a 2nd grader and he didn't really seem to think anything of it. At least Early Bird was excited to hear he was finally a kindergartener, though he worried about how that would effect his placement at kids' church. (We place him there by age rather than grade, so it won't change.)

Last year at the "end" of Builder Boy's kindergarten year I got a kindergarten skills workbook to see how he did in comparison to public school standards and to check for gaps and weaknesses. It actually taught him some things that I didn't think to teach him, so I was doubly glad we did it.

This weekend we got the 1st grade workbook for review for Builder Boy and I got the LeapFrog Kindergarten Skills workbook for Early Bird since he loves LeapFrog so much. We started doing some yesterday and all ready I've realized that while un-schooling worked for science, history, and reading, it did NOT work for handwriting. I think Builder Boy has forgotten the "correct" way to write at least half of the letters. And a page of just addition or subtraction problems was something he was NOT used to and felt overwhelmed by. Our chosen math curriculum has been much more hands on manipulatives and very little writing and no worksheets like that, so it was definitely a new experience for him. Early Bird did just fine on his pages, though he got tired of the color by number page and didn't finish it.

So to get into the swing of a more structured schoolwork routine before our official year begins in the fall, we will finish our current workbooks and then move into others that I have on hand. The timing all depends on when Lady Bug starts sleeping long enough for Mommy not to be completely exhausted during the day.
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The picture of the workbook we used last year is an Amazon affiliate link. The LeapFrog link is not.

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