Online English Key Stage 3

No.

KS3 courses are the building blocks designed to prepare your child to begin studying for GCSE, which is examined.

With no exams to worry about your child can take as much or as little time as they need to assimilate the basic principals in KS3. This can be when gifted children become bored and troublesome if they find it all too slow and easy while others may be put off learning if they have not had time to grasp the early stages of a subject. Oxford Home Schooling has the flexibility to cope with both of these extremes and everyone in between.

The answer is little and often.  At the start of each lesson, there is a short grammatical exercise that either introduces a new piece of grammar or builds on a piece of grammar previously taught.  This approach makes the learning of grammar accessible but not overwhelming to all students and prepares them for their GCSE studies.

We choose our books carefully and we try not to include anything that may concern some parents but inevitably someone will object to a particular book or a student may find it boring. Unfortunately, this is part of life and study. We will be flexible where possible but we just cannot accommodate everyone’s individual choices and it is often a good exercise in discipline to study a book that does not immediately appeal or one that has different views from our own.

This is where your individual tutor will be invaluable. They know exactly what students should be learning and how to give parents the confidence to convey that to their children.

You can speak to the tutor by phone or email and we also have the facility for you to purchase additional one on one time with a tutor if you hit a particularly tricky patch.

All our courses contain either tutor marked assignments or self assessment tests after every lesson.

It is a good idea to encourage the student to complete these tests without reference to the materials they have just studied and to impose a time limit on answering. This will give you a good idea of whether they have understood and remembered the lesson.

The tutor will also give feedback, especially if you engage with them on a fairly regular basis. Please remember though that your tutor will get a very unrealistic view of your child’s abilities if it is normally you and not the student who takes the lead in answering assignments.

We do not provide timetables as such. We have found that students all have different speeds and abilities and it is more satisfactory for each family to develop their own time table rather than being constrained by ours.

Some students will whiz through a KS3 course in under 6 months, others may take the full year. It doesn’t matter, its not a competition and the important thing is to ensure that the building blocks are firmly in place and everything has been taken in and fully understood.

Our tutors understand that everyone works at different speeds and to a different time table but the responsibility for meeting that timetable lies very much at home.

If you agree with your tutor that, for example, you will be sending in an assignment every 4 weeks and they do not receive anything, they may send out a gentle reminder. If this is ignored they do not nag. It will be assumed that if you are not contacting them, you have a good reason.

It is always polite and wise to let the tutor know if you are going to be late with an assignment or if you have decided to take a break for some reason, but unlike in a school, it is not the tutor’s responsibility to keep your child on track. That lies with you.

Something that can happen at KS3, but is much more likely with GCSE students is a little bit of fudging or a blurring of reality. You may ask if assignment “G” has been sent to the tutor and the answer will be “yes”. The tutor may say they have not received it, the student will insist they sent it so there must have been a problem with the email. No doubt most parents will be aware that this type of scenario is quite common in distance learning. As the responsible adult it is always good to insist that you are copied in on any work sent. You will copied in by the tutor on all responses.