Reply To: How to encourage practice?
To ensure variety and repetition of lessons we had a policy that the child must “practice their most recent lesson” (often, it was “practice your most recent lesson first”)
So if I saw a child still hadn’t grasped, say addition, I’d give another lesson, then they’d be on the hook to practice.
I never required that they do “one language and one math” etc. It was just “practice your most recent lesson” and I made sure I was giving a balance.
Giving them checklists always ended up just being more work for me and I didn’t find them very effective anyway.
For practice/follow-up (thinking specifically about math), to make it still their own choices we would decide with ~space and time~ (use a cool sci-fi voice, that’s always a hit.)
Space= Fill up a sheet of paper with practice. Use big paper, small paper, colored paper, grid paper, a booklet. Whatever. Sometimes challenge them to fit as many as they can within that space. etc.
Time= Practice for 15 minutes each day, do a total of 1 hour of practice before our next conference. Race yourself to see how many problems you can do in 30 mins. etc.
I nearly always set due dates and let them pick the dates.
Work Journals of course played a big part in all this and we’d review at our weekly conference.