Assessing my homeschooled children

How do you assess your homeschooled children?
This is one of the questions I am often asked. How do you know your children are up to par with their Public/Private schooled peers. This is honestly one of the harder questions, I have found, to answer. Every family is different. Most homeschooling families I know, don’t believe in standardised testing and couldn’t point me in the right direction.

Upon many late nights staying up and researching how to assess the children’s education, I decided that my best course of action would be to have the kidlets do the Annual National Assessments (ANA), set up by the South African Department of Education.

Last week Koko completed the Grade three assessments and Fifi did the Grade one assessments for English and Mathematics. They did well considering we are following the Cambridge International curriculum.

There are a few things I picked up from the assessments that we need to work on. One aspect of the CAPS mathematics curriculum hasn’t been covered yet in the Cambridge International Grade 3 curriculum and, after going through the books we are currently working on, will be covered over the next few months. Koko also seems to forget how to do his multiplication tables, so we’ll be working harder on those from now on.

Fifi is doing remarkable well and I’m very happy with her progress. She is a perfectionist, so she tends to take longer than necessary on her work for the day. This may become a problem when she is older and her workload increases, but we are working on helping her work through that little issue and she is getting better.

They both seem to rush through reading questions and most of the incorrect answers were purely from not reading the whole question and as a result not understanding what is expected of them.

All in all, I’m very happy with their progress so far and aim to continue doing these assessments with them twice a year for the foreseeable future.