Course Groups

[Tessa]

Hello, I'm new to the group and Skedtrack- Can someone explain or give an example of how to best use the Course Groups?

[HSkedtrack]

Course Group is mainly used for grade computation and would be useful if you have at least 2 "mini" courses that comprise one main course. One example would be Language Arts. This could be composed of Spelling/Vocab, Grammar, and Writing. You can use Course Group to group them and call it Language Arts or English so that only one grade will be displayed on the Report Card for Language Arts or English. Weights for the "mini" courses could be: 25% for Spelling/Vocab, 25% for Grammar, and 50% for Writing. You could give it whatever weights you want, depending on what you want to emphasize. The only requirement is - it should add up to 100%.

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[Tessa]

That's exactly what I'd hoped. It would be especially useful for Social Studies, of which there are many subjects to that course!

[Tessa]

So if I have a bunch of subjects that all belong in the same course- for example, history, geography, current events, etc. Do I add each of these separately to the courses tab so I can use them in the course group?

Here is where I'm not understanding how to set up courses and activities.

I will be setting up 3 terms- 12 weeks/36 weeks in a year- give or take a week or two . For an example, I will have 2 different geography books- the first one will go for 19 weeks (approx. term 1 and 2), and the second will be for the rest of the year or term 3 approximately. How do I schedule these in the courses tab and activities tab so that they'll be scheduled for the correct term? And they are both Social Studies, with a subject geography. Geography is also scheduled for 3 days/week- short lessons, and also includes things like map drills.

For Bible study, there are a few different studies/subjects. Reading the Bible, listening to a commentary (corresponding to the chapter read), working on a timeline, etc. these are short daily lessons/studies.

For history, it would also fall under Social Studies with activities such as reading a book or books (books could span 1,2 or all three terms), timeline work, biography book (separate from the regular history book).

Current events would be a subject also included in Social Studies-
Government and economics- subject included in Social Studies.
Citizenship- not sure where this would fall, but probably either Social Studies or just a course on it's own?

I hope my question is clear- i need help understanding the different functions of the different tabs, I guess. And how to put everything together for it to all make sense once you look at the today screen-

[HSkedtrack]

Everything that you want to include in a course group must itself be a course but they all need to span the whole school year esp if you want a grade for it. If the courses in the course group will cover only 1 semester (2 terms), make 2 separate course groups 1 for semester 1 and another for semester 2 - this is for grading purposes.

Homeschool Skedtrack