There are some that are coming near the end of their current school year.\u00a0 The excitement is building as both student and parent realize there are a few lessons left or a smaller number of pages in the workbook to be completed.\u00a0\u00a0There can be a great sense of accomplishment as the workbooks are filled and finished\u00a0containing a year of hard work.<\/p>\n
We use workbooks as well, but I want to be careful on how I use them.\u00a0 I like the idea of finishing off a\u00a0workbook and completing all the pages.\u00a0 I also like the idea of just using what a student needs from a workbook to increase their\u00a0skills and knowledge.\u00a0 It can be tempting to consider mastery of a subject as complete once all the pages are done.\u00a0 Oftentimes I have found that a workbook page can introduce a topic, but the real mastery doesn’t\u00a0occur with just getting all the answers right on the page.<\/p>\n
My boys were getting all the answers right on their grammar exercises.\u00a0 One day I decided to play a game with them instead of using the workbook.\u00a0 I made a story up with blank spaces for parts of speech.\u00a0 I then would call out a part of speech that I needed to complete the story without them knowing anything about the story.\u00a0 The resulting story would be pretty silly based on their choice of words.\u00a0 It didn’t take long for us to begin reviewing what I thought they already knew.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They started asking questions\u00a0like:\u00a0 What is an interjection again?\u00a0 An adjective describes things right?\u00a0 What is the difference between a verb and adverb?<\/p>\n
Once we reviewed the parts of speech and they became confident of supplying an adverb when I called for that part of speech the fun really started.\u00a0 They wanted to play over and over again and they were getting the correct parts of speech after we did real life examples.\u00a0 The workbook helped to introduce the concepts but the real learning happened when we weren’t using the workbook.<\/p>\n