Teaching Your Student

To get the most out of your student’s K12 education, it is essential that you think about how to adapt the materials and lessons to your student’s own character, skills, and schedule:

Understand Behavior Patterns

Students of all ages develop their own rhythms for sleeping, eating, and learning. Once you see the patterns in your student, use those patterns to improve the learning experience. If your student is an early riser, use that time to work on lessons that require your assistance. This is especially valuable if you have multiple children and the others sleep a little later. Some students like long uninterrupted learning stretches; others benefit from a timer, short breaks, or maybe an occasional exercise break. A break or a light snack can help refocus attention. Be flexible and find what works best.

Identify Learning Styles

As you work with your students, think about how they seem to learn best. Do they respond best to things presented visually? Do they need to hear information to retain it? Or do they learn best by manipulating objects? Use what you learn about your child to modify the presentation of lessons. Don’t be afraid to leave certain activities out, or add new activities, if they help your students master the objectives.

Recognize Student Abilities

Each student has areas of academic strength and challenge. You may know already where you will need to spend more time, and where you should skip ahead to the assessment. You will also find you can “read” your student’s level of comfort with the day’s material to adjust your pace. Don’t be afraid to spend extra hours (or days) on important things that are hard for your student—mastery is the goal, and the bell doesn’t ring in 50 minutes! On the other hand, there is no need to spend valuable learning time if you feel your student understands or has already mastered the lesson objectives. The OLS, through its advanced features, provides the flexibility for your student to prove mastery by taking assessments prior to taking the actual lessons.

Build on Prior Knowledge and Interests

All students come to K12 with unique prior knowledge and interests that are the scaffold for new learning. Capitalizing on the interests and skills of your students increases learning. When working on a lesson that presents new ideas, think about making connections with ideas your student already knows and loves by asking connected questions or talking about related experiences.

Preparing to Teach

Review Course Introductions

Course Introductions provide valuable information about the philosophy and specific features of each course. Reading them helps you understand why a course is structured the way it is and gives a preview of what’s in the teacher guide and other materials.

Gather Lesson Materials Ahead of Time

A full list of materials needed for each lesson is included in your daily and weekly lesson plans. The list shows K12-supplied materials, household items, common items you will need to get (such as glue and crayons) and documents you will need to print. You will save valuable teaching time if you gather everything you need for your lesson ahead of time. Many families get all this together a day or even a week in advance. Save time by asking students to help gather, print, and store materials. Elicit the help of older students in the preparation.

Consider All Students

If you are working with multiple children, consider their different needs as you plan to teach. Many families try to make sure each older student has an independent activity or lesson that frees the adult to support other students. Collect several boxes of materials (puzzles, clay, sand, activity books, etc.) just for the little ones to use during the older siblings’ school time. The box should only come out during school time, and it should be replenished often with new things.

Review the Teacher’s Materials

Courses in grades K–3 provide instructions online to guide you in teaching the lessons. Portions of the online materials are designed for you to use directly with your student, too.

Courses in grades 4–5 and middle school courses include separate teacher guides. The teacher guides include essential information and ideas to help you guide a lesson. These can include step-by-step directions for teaching a lesson, as well as a rich array of strategies including teaching tips, alternate activities, and other resources. Often, answer keys are in the teacher guide.

Review the Student’s Materials and Online Lessons

In addition to any teacher guides, review the online lessons and supporting materials for your student. Remember that mastering the objectives for the lesson is the key goal. By reviewing these first, you can easily make decisions to speed up or slow down the learning experience to reach mastery as efficiently as possible. Reviewing the objectives and the assessments before teaching the lesson will help you and your student spend just the right amount of time on the right activities in the lesson.

Teaching

Set Expectations

At the start of each day, set realistic expectations for your student. Students relate well to routines, so many families (not all) find that a regular schedule works best. If you have multiple children, a regular schedule can help you organize their activities to give you time with the children who need it most, when they need it most.

Be Flexible in Your Use of Lessons

Always remember that the K12 curriculum is a mastery-based program. Young minds master different objectives at different rates—sometimes differently from week to week. Each lesson is designed with many activities to ensure that most students will master the objectives. Choose activities that will best help your students reach mastery. You may not need to do every single activity or every single exercise within a given lesson to reach mastery. But they are there if your students need the extra work to master a concept or are so interested that they don’t want to stop.

Many families find that moving on quickly when their student masters an objective frees up time to focus on skills that may come more slowly, or on areas where the student wants to spend more time. Use the assessments as tools (along with your own judgment) to check if your student has reached mastery. If he or she has, you can move on.

Benefit from Independent Work

Assess the ability of each student to work independently on the day’s lessons. Families find it wonderful when they can take advantage of a student’s independence to look ahead or work with other students. As your students mature and become more familiar with the program, you may choose to allow them to work more independently. Middle school courses in particular are designed to be done quite independently, but always use your judgment to decide how much independence each student can handle.