Use a Spiral Review System to Help Your Kids Remember Their Homeschool Lessons

In my house we teach using the mastery system.  I teach one topic, and we don’t move on until they have mastered the topic. That might mean we need to restart a unit and reteach all of the lessons until the topic is understood, but they all learn the material.

But over time, the kids forget what they’ve learned because they aren’t reviewing it.

That’s the beauty of spiral learning systems. Spiral learning systems teach a little bit of a new topic every day while constantly reviewing old materials.  I learned the hard way my kids do not like or learn well with a complete spiral approach, but they do need a bit of review from time to time.

Enter our morning review time.

Last year I wrote all about using the challenge cards from The Mystery of History to review in a Jeopardy-style game.  If you look at the picture on the post, I’ve got many different colored cards.

History is easy. I just print out the challenge cards and I’m done. But science?  That’s not so easy.

That’s when it hit me.  I’ve already got them written right here in my (affiliate link) Christian Kids Explore Biology textbook.  Most lessons end with review questions and there’s always a unit test.  All I have to do is put them in a word document and cut out the cards.

Problem solved.

It’s been amazing seeing how much better my kids are retaining the material now that I’ve got all of the material for them to review.  Also, if the material was important enough for it to be on the test, then it’s important enough for me to keep asking questions about it.

This morning I just finished writing up all of the questions for our entire year.  When I print up the cards, I’m going to split them into different envelopes by unit.  That way when we have finished the next unit, I can just add in those cards.  Simple and easy.

I like easy.