Homeschool conventions have an amazing way of exhausting and exciting me at the same time.
Wanted to share some of the great resources and speakers I enjoyed this past weekend.
Not to overwhelm, we’ll tackle excerpts from two of them today.
First, the College Board rep gave a little lunch time talk on CLEP tests.
She offered lots of helpful info on CLEP exams that made them seem a little more within reach.
CLEP:
– offers huge savings over paying for college, even community college, tuition
– Recommended the book College without Compromise and the CLEP official test book that comes out each year and is available for Amazon.
– No penalty for wrong answers.
– No age restrictions (her kids have taken them as early as 7th grade — earning college credit in middle school!)
– Immediate results. Because it is computer based and you can take it at a variety of times throughout the year, you get an immediate result and know if you pass or not before heading home.
– accepted at 2900 colleges. However, as I was looking at some local ones, the extent they accept them does vary a bit. Some will only accept some of them as elective credits. Others require a higher score than the minimum. So, if you are CLEPping specifically to save on college tuition, do your homework ahead of time with potential colleges.
She gave great tips on actually taking the test including using the practice tests after you have completed high school course work in the subject area. She recommended when practicing to make sure to get two tests in a row with scores in the high 50’s before you attempt the actual test. And, celebrate pass or fail, your kids deserve a reward for all the hard work.
She has a website of her own as well, Credits before College
The official CLEP website has lots of info, or course.
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Another speaker, Janice Campbell offered some great insight into grading pieces of writing.
Her website has a number of great resources that you might find helpful, especially in teaching junior and senior high students. She had tips for teaching writing as well as some general teaching tips.
Check out all her info and resources at Everyday Education.
Here are a few of the points that I appreciated from what she had to say:
– In order to evaluate and encourage better writing in your student you need a rubric (which you can find at her site when you give your email), a handbook (to reference specific rules that the student needs to work on), a thesaurus, and a dictionary
– When grading the rough draft you first grade only content. Don’t get bogged down in specific words and mechanics. The rough draft first needs to be adjusted to get the information in an orderly format that completes the assigned writing task. Later revisions will get into the details of style.
– The goal is to teach the student to edit and evaluate themselves (a rubric helps significantly with this because it makes grading so much more concrete).
She shared many more specifics about evaluating writing, but those were the big ones that stuck with me and will have a great impact on how I read and evaluate my kids’ writing.
Did you go to ICHE? Have a favorite workshop?
