Homeschool Quizzing for Four Grade Levels

TL;DR: It’s challenging.

Some of you know we homeschool our four children. Their U.S. grade levels range from 1st to 6th grade. Suzanne teaches them Monday through Thursday, and I put in a half-day on Friday to school them in the morning.

Because Suzanne covers several of the foundational topics such as math, science, and history, I complement their studies with less fundamental things like Spanish, sports, music, and computers (most notably HTML & CSS). One might argue these latter subjects are equally foundational, but that’s another topic for another day.

It’s quite challenging, as you might expect, to gather, produce, and teach curriculum to four different grade levels simultaneously. I won’t delve into how we do it, as that’s also another topic for another day.

Instead, I’ll simply share our latest quiz (PDF) from last Friday, encompassing the four subjects I’m currently teaching:

Created somewhat hastily in Pages (questions) and Illustrator (rhythm exercises), they certainly aren’t anything to brag about in terms of production quality. And this is only one of four quizzes. Each child gets a different version of the quiz according to their grade level and educational maturity.

What’s notable, I think, is that this latest quiz was our most comprehensive yet. It covers quite a bit of material, in part because the last quiz I issued was back in January 2012. A crazy work schedule in recent weeks hasn’t allowed me to stay on top of schooling as much as I’d like. Which, you guessed it, is another topic for another day — that of adequately educating our children while balancing the rest of life’s demands.

All of this rambling and quiz tomfoolery leads to this pro tip and the real reason for this post: I’ve found it helpful to create the quiz for the most senior grade level first, and then pair down a) the volume of questions and b) the difficulty of the questions. This makes the insurmountable task of creating quizzes for four grade levels a little less impossible.

Note that I’ve said nothing about quizzing itself and the debate among homeschoolers about testing your children. Regardless of those debates, I find quizzes to be helpful to evaluate how I’m doing as a teacher and to gauge how they’re internalizing what I teach.

Hopefully, something I’ve said here is helpful for those of you currently homeschooling or those of you considering it. If you haven’t already, you’ll discover homeschooling is precisely the same as parenting: Read as many books and blogs as you’d like, but at the end of the day, it’s all about trial and error. Lest you think I have this quizzing thing figured out (and homeschooling in general), I’ve made plenty of errors and continue to error.

Maybe I’ll share that story another day, too.