End of Year Evaluation in ECC

Okay, not to brag on Rabbit, but I'm going to :) ...

I just did the end-of-year evaluation with my dd Rabbit. Remember, we finished school about 4 weeks ago and haven't done ANY geography since (just spelling, math, typing). Also, remember we came from a textbook/workbook curriculum to MFW - what a big change.

One of the evaluations is to label blank maps of each continent. We did it at the beginning of the year, and she could only label 11 countries. Well, we just did it again, and she was able to correctly label 83 things - some oceans and gulfs, and countries. So, the Geography game really works! Also, filling in the maps at the beginning of each continent works. We hardly ever discussed the Gulf of California, but she knew where it was.

We also went through each country we visited, and I had her talk about what she remembered. Most of it wasn't important stuff, but she did get something out of each country - either it was the largest (or 3rd largest), or the language(s) spoken, or the climate, or their main export (oil for Saudi Arabia), or their religion, or their animals (especially Australia). I would ask her what missionaries we read about went to that country or were from that country. She remembered some interesting little tidbits.

Finally, I asked her if we could visit any of the countries we studied for real, which would she choose? She said China or Japan. She found their cultures interesting and thought it would neat to see what she read about. Also, she loves rice, so she thought it would be neat to see how rice is grown.

Anyway, I'm so pleased with how well she did. We didn't really study the geography terms that much this year. She did them, but it was NOT her favorite thing. We'll get ECC again in 8th grade, so we'll focus on it a bit more then.

We also had to do standardized testing this year. We got her scores back last week. The area we need to work on most: language mechanics - you know, commas, periods, subject, verb. But, everything else was great. She did better than I expected in math, and reading comprehension was awesome. Writing is her weakest point. We did a lot of assignments orally, or she dictated to me, and I wrote, so use of commas and periods wasn't something we focused on a lot. I'll work on it more next year.

We really enjoyed this year, and our relationship is so much better.