So here is his learning project. At the end of it, I made some end of cycle competency documents. I’ve been doing this since we started homeschooling in Grade 4. It helps me to get my head around what I need to report on and J uses them as he plans his own learning activities. I tell him he can do whatever he wants, as long as I can report competency development and he is learning some of the required content. So this helps him with that.
2025-2026 Learning Project
- Here is a link to the learning project, it’s a google slideshow.
- Here are links to some of the resources we use.
This time it was interesting, as he developed his own big project through which he was able to demonstrate learning and competency development for almost all courses. You can learn more about that in the Learning Project document below.
We’ll be continuing with homeschooling throughout high school – as he says, I’ve tried school, it doesn’t work for me.
Here is where I am organizing the resources we use by subject matter:
And here is a copy of his Learning Project + end of year reports and evaluation. I know how tricky it can be to come up with ideas, so feel free to use it as an example if you like it. Or don’t, whatever works for you
Here’s the learning plan we submitted for the rest of the year. As with all our documents on this site – I hope you can find it helpful for ideas or resources as you create your own learning plan.
I don’t use the DEM template, I’ve been submitting my learning plans and reports in this format for 4 years now.
c1 – Examines social phenomena from a historical perspective
Jack was just starting History at school, they did Geography in the first half of the year. Today he read about Paleolithic life and filled in the question grids about that section. Pretty typical school-based workbook stuff.
We talked about how this workbook is essentially teaching you how to read documents, especially at this beginning part of the workbook.
We also had an interesting conversation about Bering strait theory. He mentioned that there were three theories but that the “right” one was Bering strait so I commented that there are many people who don’t agree with it. We researched controversy around it and saw different arguments. He kept insisting that it was the only theory that makes sense, though he started to reflect, I could tell.
Just before finishing up, he commented that the workbook doesn’t say it is a theory. That it positions it as the truth and they should say it is a theory.
Here are some of the resources we looked through together that lead to him considering that there isn’t only one version that is right and true.
Math
He also worked on Math Help Services questions re: Percentage Word Problems Level 1
I notice he speaks the problems aloud to get his head around them. He could figure them out, some were challenging and he asked for help. All I did was read them out to him again. He completed them all 100%
PS – we aren’t officially homeschooling at this point. We’ll take the March break to figure it out. So I’m making sure he is keeping up with school work for now.
]]>Here is our Grade 6 learning project, submitted in October.
And here is our midyear report. We had our monitoring meeting with our ministry representative today and all is on track. I’ll incorporate the info in this document into the learning project when I prepare his completion report.
My main focus is letting him learn on his own terms, mixed with prep for the English Language Arts and Math Provincial examinations he is forced to take in June. If he has to take them, I’d like him to feel good about them.
I can’t be there with him, even though in the school system the teacher is the one who administers these exams and I am his teacher. I can’t even attend any preparatory sessions with him… sigh… Luckily I have some friends who are helping out with some prep materials to make sure I prepare him in a good way. I’ve never taught those particular subjects in Grade 6 before!
I share these documents so others can see different ways we can communicate with the government. The Quebec ministry of education department for Homeschooling has templates you can use but I can’t fit my beautiful child into those horrible documents. So I make my own.
]]>Last week, our DEM (Direction de l’enseignement à la maison) representative called me to let me know that our final report was accepted – and with flying colours (insert shameless pat on the back here. Homeschooling, changing jobs, Bill 96, Bill 21 (still), pandemic (still) … what a year!)
I do my reports differently. I am both his homeschool provider and his evaluating teacher so I combine both reports in one. I do so using a google slideshow because it helps me to make sense of it all when I organize it that way.
A note on how I homeschool and evaluate
Progression of Learning (POL)
I never refer to the progression of learning. Never.
The progression of learning is a document that was created by teachers to help them manage a competency-based program that runs over a cycle of 2 years. The majority of teachers share their students with other teachers and don’t keep the same students for the full 2 years. And they are working with multiple groups of anywhere from 15 – 30+ students at a time. For example – a French teacher in an elementary school could have 30 – 100+ students a year, depending on the school. At high school, that number can grow significantly. And students change schools over the course of their schooling as well. So the POL was created to help manage content knowledge within that context not within a homeschooling context.
As teaching parents of our own children, we don’t have the same issues, It is NOT the curriculum. It is not the Quebec Education Program (QEP).
End of Cycle Outcomes
I go straight to the program and focus on the end of cycle outcomes that are included with each competency in each program of study. So my Learning Project, Teacher Evaluation, and Mid/Final Reports are all organized along the end of cycle outcomes for each competency. When I focus on those, I find the QEP is actually very homeschooling friendly. It’s really about developing competency and not about lists of things to learn and memorize.
What does it look like during the learning process?
Aha! This is where the homeschooling magic happens. Jack and I get to know the competencies and end of cycle outcomes so whatever he is working on, we are able to figure out what competencies he is developing. We start with what he is doing and then map it to the competencies in order to “prove” his learning to our DEM rep. The competencies and end of cycle outcomes are government technicalities. They are not the most important part of his learning, so they come last.
Learning happens all the time no matter what.
Paperwork
Here is the accepted report for 2021-2022. (you can see it larger by running the presentation in Google Drive here or by selecting full screen via the three dots under the presentation below.)
And here are some samples of work we showed our DEM rep at our yearly monitoring meeting where you can see how Jack’s personal interests (ex: coding, 3D design, history, mapping, Minecraft) were used to demonstrate competency development.
(You can see it larger by viewing it as a presentation in Google Slides here or by selecting full screen via the three dots under the presentation below.)
I truly hope that Jack can be in school with his friends this coming year. But you never know, we may be back!
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We’ve been homeschooling again since about mid-January. Jack was back in school as of September and I was actually his classroom teacher. But once again the Quebec government’s treatment of the school system during a pandemic had me scurrying us home.
We were teaching online the week after Winter break. During that week, we received so many emails about changing health protocols, about how teachers could be expected to teach multiple groups simultaneously because so many were out sick, about how bus lines could be cut due to driver illnesses. I felt myself slip into that panic zone from early 2020 and thought – how is it that two years later we are STILL reacting as if no one knew this was coming and everything is to continue as “normal”? I am so grateful that my previous employer accepted me back, no questions asked, so I didn’t need to stay in that mess. I am sad that my colleagues and friends do.
I’m glad that we are back home. So is Jack, for the most part. He misses recess and lunch a lot. Luckily there is Minecraft and video chat and he plays and chats with a solid core group of friends pretty much daily.
It is still a lot of work, homeschooling and working full-time, as well as you know, the laundry, cleaning, shopping, garbage day, feeding merry-go-round + making time to just be together and have fun But we will never, ever miss the morning rush of getting to the bus stop by 7:25 am. Ever.
Because I registered him as a homeschooler after January 1, we have slightly less paperwork to deal with. Basically we can combine our status report with our end of year report instead of with a mid-year report because we aren’t obligated to complete one.
Last year we received our first contact from the Direction de l’enseignement à la maison (aka DEM) in June. This year was much quicker and we have already scheduled a monitoring meeting, where they basically check in to make sure we are following our learning plan, for mid-April.
Here is the learning project being monitored, approved by the DEM. They’d like me to fill in a pre-set form but I write my plans differently than they expect. All of a sudden in January I had to pan out the rest of Jack’s year and it helps me to get my head around what we are planning related to the competencies we are asked to show progression in when I make a presentation out of it. So this is more for me then for the DEM but my days are busy so instead of pulling out info to fit into their plan, I just submit the whole thing. Luckily, I was actively teaching the majority of his subjects earlier this school year so it wasn’t a stretch to match our home-based activities with the expected competencies.
(If you view the project as a slide-show, it’s easier to interact with the links within it. And also easier to read, there is a lot of info on each slide.)
We will start to fill in some of the blank areas with samples of work over the next little while, to facilitate our upcoming monitoring meeting with our DEM rep.
If this at all inspires you for your own Grade 5 learning project, feel free to use anything within it. You can use the whole thing, replacing pictures and other info with your child’s, or just copy/paste some lines that you feel will work with your child.
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It is a series of short reading activities about traditions that bring us together РPow Wow, hockey, temps des sucres, p̻che blanche, jardinage Рwith questions that lead to other reading activities to help in finding the responses.
This is a nice cross-over between Social Sciences and FLS. The site is available in both French and English, we will use it for French.
It is published by the Rendez-vous de la Francophonie, which has a lot of resources that we’ll likely return to.
(PS – we’ve been back homeschooling since the end of online learning in January. I’ll update with some more of our resources soon. I also changed jobs at the same time, moving from classroom teaching to online consulting so it’s been busy )
Learning Project
I registered Jack with the DEM on September 8, when we found out the results of a hearing on equal access to online learning in Quebec:
Quebec Superior Court Justice Frederic Bachand refused the parents’ request for a safeguard order that would have given parents immediate access to remote courses for their children as the case awaits trial.
Quebec Parents Lose First Round in Legal Fight for Online Classes Amid Pandemic – NorthShore News, September 8
I had 30 days from registration to submit my learning plan and I submitted it yesterday afternoon. So the plan here has yet to receive feedback. I will update this when (if ) I hear from the DEM. I used a document from the Association Québécoise pour l’Éducation à Domicile (AQED) as a model for my plan. I became a member shortly after registering Jack. It has been a good investment so far.
End of school year update
So the year is over. My learning plan was never officially approved (nor the opposite…) but I did meet with a rep for our monitoring meeting on June 1. This was the first and only time I met with a DEM rep throughout the whole process. Probably a good thing.
Since I am a teacher, I chose teacher evaluation as my evaluation method. When I am making sense of things, I create slideshows or websites. It is just what I do. So, as I was mapping the end of cycle outcomes for Cycle 2 to his learning, I did so via a Google Slideshow. And I decided to just submit that as my final report. It represents much more than what is necessary for reporting BUT it was necessary for my process and I didn’t want to try to fit it into the DEM documentation after the fact. I submitted it at the beginning of June and at the end of July I was told that it is accepted, no other feedback beyond that.
Here is his report. The mid-year report was similar, I added to it to create this final one.
School is now about a month away. He is registered to return to his old school and we will see what happens with Covid as the year starts. I feel a bit better this year as the adults in his school will all have been vaccinated, but this Delta variant … there are still many unknowns. We will see how things progress.
]]>When learning from home, a lot of our learning and production happens digitally so the resources created by the R̩cit (basically a network of educators collaborating on digital resources for learning in Quebec) are super helpful. They are aligned with the Quebec Education Program (QEP) and use open educational resources Рso I know that my son is learning with resources that anyone can access. Oh, and they are free to use
We try to work bilingually so we pick and choose from the French sector resources and the English sector resources. We also supplement these resources with many others in order to ensure strong development in competency 3 – to be open to diversity of societies and territories.
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