Quick Start Guide for My EP Assignments
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Here’s our basic How-To-Use Video.
We have a whole page of videos that talk about the different aspects of the curriculum.
There are more videos related to My EP Assignments on that site.
Please consider using Adblock Plus (free) to protect your kids from advertisements, and switching on Restricted Mode on Youtube.
There are two decisions you need to make to get started with this curriculum. First, choose your child’s LEVEL. You can select a pre-made level, ie. First, Second, or Third, or you can mix and match and have your child do a different level for math, reading and language arts. I suggest just choosing a level and then making any adjustments from there. The course descriptions are at the top of each course page to let you know what they will be learning. Here are our placement guides to aid you in your decision:
Click Here >>> Placement Guides <<< Click Here
The second decision is to choose a THEME for this school year. All of your children will use the same Theme. Next year, you will choose a different Theme. You can start with any of the following:
Ancient History (along with Biology)
Early American History (along with Zoology)
Geography and Cultures (along with Earth Science)
Modern History (along with Physics and Chemistry)
Music and art will follow along with the history studies.
This is the order of the themes. You can start anywhere, but we suggest cycling through them from that point in order.
Music and art relate appear once a week in the curriculum. PE/health, computer and “thinking” are also once a week.
From MyEPAssignments.com, your child will just click on each lesson link and follow the directions from there. It will take your student to their lessons.
When you see an asterisk *, it means that there is a worksheet. You will need to print it out or you can find it in your Printables book or Workbook. (*) means it is optional. I mark the day, the subject, and then the specific item that needs printing. I did this so that you can easily look ahead and print out what’s needed ahead of time. (The younger the student, the more to print.) Some of our courses have a PDF at the top of the course where you can print out all those worksheets at once. Those packets are available as Printables books that you can purchase and are priced to make it just as cheap to buy as to print. As much as possible, I have them do things online instead of on paper. Materials needed are written out in bold next to the day they are used.
We have our math, reading, and language arts courses for this site available in books to be used offline if you want your child off the computer as much as possible.
Answers come in two forms. There are password protected answer pages. You can find out how to get the password on the FAQ page. Other times I wrote the answers right on the page like this (answer: All you have to do it highlight it to see it.) The answer is there, written in white. Just click and drag and highlight over the blank area to see the answer. Try it now. Occasionally I put hints like that as well. Most of the answers are not hidden from your kids. I used it for English because I wanted to be able to check for reading comprehension. If you check the answers on the same computer and same browser that your kids are using, your computer will remember the password and show the answers in the future. You can clear your cache to have it forget the password and then start checking at least on a separate browser if not computer. Or, you might just want to tell your kids not to look at the answers. 🙂
Every forty days there are notes to the kids to give things to you to add to your portfolio, so you should have a record from each subject quarterly. I didn’t do this specifically for first and second grade because my state, Pennsylvania, doesn’t require portfolios until age 8, but I did leave some reminders on those pages if you would like to keep a portfolio.
Your child just needs basic tools: pencil, scissors, glue, crayons or colored pencils. There are links to “materials needed” lists at the top of each course page. I talk about putting something in your “Bible notebook” or something similar. I have all of my child’s work in one binder. I have dividers for English, History, Science, Math, Other. They need to keep their papers somewhere. My oldest has composition notebooks for a few subjects. They will need to write things in their “notebooks” sometimes, which can just be lined paper or notebooking pages in their binders. Use separate binders, keep it all together, whatever; just keep it organized so that they can find their work.
The grade “levels” cover math, English, computer and “thinking.” Reading covers reading and vocabulary. Language Arts covers spelling, grammar, creative and non-fiction writing. Sometimes the children are prompted to read something before an audience to practice speaking. I would say not all years are equal in their devotion to spelling, vocabulary and grammar. Spelling is covered the least. There is no weekly spelling list. That’s not how I do things. They learn phonics and do copy work and when they are older, I just visit it from time to time. Vocabulary comes from the books they are reading. Again, it’s not a weekly list or something. It’s just here and there as we come across great words in our reading. Grammar follows more of a guideline. Each year I introduce a part of speech and review the others. They also work on sentence structure each year, getting more and more complex as they get older. Capitalization and punctuation is also done each year to varying degrees.
The theme courses are split into two levels. Levels 1 – 4 is the lower level for grade levels one through four. Levels 5 – 8 is the middle level for grade levels five through eight. The high school courses are housed at allinonehighschool.com.
It is set up this way so that all of your children can study the same things at the same time. Everyone in your family should use the same theme. I just let my first grader study whatever he finds interesting from what the others are doing.
If you go to a link and it says that the page isn’t found or it opens up to the wrong website, please email me or post it on the facebook support group. If the page opens but the game or video isn’t loading, make sure you have installed and updated your Flash player. Try our Troubleshooting Guide. If the page says that it’s under construction, we’ll probably just wait until it’s back and not switch it. If you are using an iPad, you will need an application to allow you to use Flash files. However, we are working continually on removing Flash content and replacing it with mobile-friendly content.
If you are using more than one course, please consider using MyEPAssignments.com to access your courses. It was made to track your day numbers and make things easy peasy for you.
(Hint: to make the font bigger or smaller on your screen try hitting ctrl + or ctrl -)
There is also a Facebook Group where you can ask questions. On the group page you can also find links to groups for the individual levels of the curriculum and a group that shares extra resources they use with their children. I do not supplement the curriculum, and I don’t believe there is a need to. The main group page is for EP only and not to share about other resources. I want to keep it Easy Peasy and don’t want anyone (or myself) overwhelmed with the endless influx of “great” resources, even if they are free.