This topic came up on one of my email groups. I've been thinking that having found something that works for me it was time to post it... so here's another post on planning for the northern summer planning frenzy.
Up until the current year, OK the current five months, I've carefully planned out chapter and amount for every one of my kids school work on an excel spreadsheet, included an overview of activities etc, put in break weeks to allow catch up on the things that we would fall behind in or just life happening.
Unfortunately my kids have never appreciated the wisdom of keeping to the plan... NEVER! And after years of struggling with the multiple weeks of being behind, the grumpiness of re-hashing the plans fortnightly, and the weeks when it just doesn't work I've finally accepted that this isn't what its meant to look like for us. It simply isn't what God wants me or my family to do.
Fortunately there are a lot of ladies with blogs and in email groups that have encouraged me to trust God, listen to God and move forward. Slowly I am.
So for the last 5 months we have been moving to a far simpler plan. I still divide up the course work for Latin, Math and Greek into weekly chunks. Or rather I work out how many lessons, or how much a week we need to cover so I can let the kids know when we are done, or when we are crawling...or recognize when someone is staring at the same maths problem or Latin translation for over a week.
For Language Arts and Humanities. I prepared a list of 40 weeks of topics. Normally determined by whatever we are using as a spine. Then each week I grab the next topic - or the next appropriate topic and plan out what we are doing while curled up at my daughters ballet lesson. Simple. Because I've enjoyed the format, the big chunks get planned out on a blog and a copy pasted in my planning book. That way its flexible, it sits pretty on my computer inviting me to come, think, plan. The kids tend to like these all together subjects so there isn't normally a problem on doing them, and if we don;t get through the terms chunk we can roll it into the next session.
I plan in one week blocks - one week of Poetry, one week of grammar, one week of history ... week long blocks that might break all the conventional wisdom of how to educate, but which simplify out how much we have to think about. We nicknamed the language art topics as our toolbox, the humanities subjects notebook studies . I can see it being renamed in the next wee while. In that week we dig deep, review heaps, have fun. We have time to play games with grammar (diagramming counts as games doesn't it) practice skills, work together. The plans take into account how we are feeling, what worked last time, what we remembered, what we still need to work on.
We work on one area or skill for 4 days of 1 -2 hour blocks. We're fairly flexible with what we do, if the kids have an idea for an assignment, or something jumps out of the text as useful to do we follow that, otherwise we follow whatever spine or activity book I have on hand. On the last day of the week the kids have a simple but lengthy assignment to integrate what we have learned. They have to produce on piece of writing - essay, narration, description or poetry. One peice of Art work. The content comes from our humanities studies, the tools from our ongoing toolbox studies.
I don't always grab the next thing - like this week I've taken the softest options I can - after a day's skiing coming off the mountain and getting back into school is hard, the disruption of not getting back into school is probably worse - so we'll grab the next literature book and enjoy, pick up art and have fun. Hopefully by lunchtime feel ready to cope with something meatier. OK its not as easy as having ready made plans that you pull of the shelf. But I can plan around things that are happening at dad's school, tiredness, ballet exams, skiing..etc. When the standard week changes I'm not scrambling to pick up the pieces.
It lets us have a flexible schedule - we have always kept to the school terms .. hubby is a teacher so it seemed right. Now realizing that hubby as a teacher gets excluded from our days because of it, and well he spends most of the holidays planning, we're getting more flexible mainly not being held to ten weeks on two off gives me a chance to stop when life gets busy rather than press on and get stressed.
Each day I remember that God has a plan, a good plan, with just enough for each day, time for all the aspects of our life, time to be.
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Its been a great week for achieving those things I normally brush aside. With hubby home for the mid-winter school break, and the kids in light school, we've spent the last two weeks semi crashed out studying swimming creatures, I've managed the following....
