Year 1 Homeschool EXAM WEEK

Today I’m inviting you into our week of exams. If a Charlotte Mason Exam Week for your younger years seems confusing, I hope I'm able to help demystify it all and empower you to jump in to an exciting exam week!

​The greatest lesson I’ve learned this year is that any worry I had going in to term 1 exams were based off of an old system of pass or fail. A Charlotte Mason based exam week isn’t about what the student doesn’t know, it’s a celebration of what the student DOES know!

It’s sitting with the child and giving them the time and space to tell you a story on the subject that they can recall in its fullest detail and maybe go down the rabbit holes of the connections they’ve made through that story.

I imagine that in the years to come these conversations will get deeper, more philosophical, deeply connected and perhaps take much longer not because it’s work but because it’s always hard to stop a good conversation.

​In Year 1, I found my daughter grew with each term and let loose. She actually came to look forward to her exams! Some subjects take longer than others for us like, history and math.

The ones that took the shortest amount of time were the enrichments like artist study, hymn and folk song and poetry recitation.

This is how we break down exams week:

• We choose 2-3 subjects a day, usually 1 easy one and 2 longer conversation ones. (Ex: copywork, history & Spanish)
• I always record our conversations and then transcribe later. HOWEVER, it might be easier for you, the parent, to transcribe as they speak so that you don’t have to spend the time later on transcribing. In this first year, I wanted to try this route of transcribing later so that I could really drive home this idea of having deeper conversations eye to eye.

A Note on Transcribing...

There are apps and software you can use to do this but inevitably there will be a lot of filler words like uh, um, etc ... words that the transcription service just won’t understand so you’ll have to go through those again.

Personally, I tried transcribing via Otter and TranscribeMe but inevitably just listened in on our conversations and typed out the essence of our conversations.

Moving forward, I think I might try just hand writing what she says into bullet points and record her just for records and posterity purposes.

• So then thirdly, I take those transcriptions and put them into my binder which ends up becoming our evaluation binder for her by the end of the year.

At the beginning of the year I made subject covers so that as the year rolled on I could just keep pieces of work that I thought would work best for the evaluation binder and keep it as organized as I could. I actually have this portfolio package for sale in my Etsy shop in case you’re interested. I’ll leave a special discount code for my Youtube friends down below too.

I plan to make a short follow up video next on how I put mu evaluation/portfolio binder together and how an evaluation with a certified teacher goes next. I have many of you guys reach out to me about my Year 1 schedule layout and I plan to share that with you in the following video too! If you don’t want to miss it, please make sure to subscribe and click on the bell so that you’re notified when the next video premieres.

Hope you found this exam week insightful and helpful!

​See you soon!