Following on from my post this morning, sharing our maths goals or curriculum for the past year, this is the homeschool report I will be submitting to Queensland HEU for maths year 3 and 4.
Do you think it’s enough? I’m trying to keep everything as short as possible. I’ll let you know if it is approved or not. ( see the note end of post)
Homeschool Maths Report Queensland
Looking back at last year’s submitted maths goals I can see that we have covered everything we set out to cover, and more.
There are two areas that I will go back and recap in the next few weeks, just to make sure my son has “got it”, primarily because we did them a long time ago and haven’t had much reason to practice them since. These are:
Put fractions in lowest terms.
Mixed operations with brackets.
One item on last year’s goals we did not cover as we expected:
Memorise and understand multiplication tables to 12.
Instead of memorising tables we have covered multiplication and division by working out answers, mentally and on paper, not rote learning. I think this has worked in my son’s favour, he is good at the skills required to do this, doubles, double doubles etc. He does, of course, know 2, 3, 5, 9, 10 and 11 times tables, in our own way. ie, he knows that 3 4s are 12, but is not required to “perform” times tables. I don’t think it’s necessary. We may do more on this over the coming year.
Dylan has completed New Signpost Maths for Queensland, Year 4 already in the last year, despite being officially at the start of year 4.
He also completed School Zone Maths Basics Books 4 and 5, ages 8-11. Not including long division. We are leaving this for now.
He has practiced his maths using Study Ladder levels Orange ( year 3 ) Blue ( year 4) and some Brown and Black (years 5 and 6) Completing most of the fractions and decimals section in the higher levels. We find Study Ladder to be at a lower level than we would expect, they say they are aligned with the Australian Curriculum; I’m not convinced that is true.
It has been very interesting to observe the maths skills he has been applying in Minecraft and in his computer programming through Crash this year.
Overall my son is ahead of his school peers in maths and has a good grasp of required areas. I have no concerns.
UPDATE: This Maths Homeschool Report was approved with no conditions. The HEA concluded that this child was above peer level in Maths
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