lesson plans. . .

[Guest Barb B]

I admit it - I tend to get materials that make it easy to plan. Like math - we do the next lesson and take the tests when Saxon indicates. For history last year - we had an ap US history text and I told ds that we would have weekly tests. I didn't plan anything - it was up to him to figure out when to read and how to study to be ready. For lit. we used Seton for 3 years so we went by their plans (more or less).

 

For some reason, with ds now in 12th, I find myself wondering if I should be planning more. I hear of others filing plans or putting them into binders. Help me out, what do you plan and how? I hope this sounds like I want it too - I truly want to learn how to organize and plan better!

 

Barb

[KAR120C]

I've done binders, files, lists and schedules..... And at the time they were right for us and worked out great. One year I did a "menu" of different options -- like "You have to do math every day, but here are all the possible things you could do that count as math - it's up to you which one you do on any given day." That was fun.

 

But really - by high school I greatly prefer for DS to do more of his own organizing. I think that's really part of his education, learning how to pace himself, plan for larger projects, and meet deadlines. Also, he has enough outside committments now with their own requirements and deadlines, that it really isn't up to me anyway. I do still lay out a year as though I were directing it, just to establish for myself that it's manageable (to prevent overloading the calendar and scheduling conflicts), and I consult with DS about how he's going to handle things. I make suggestions and he frequently follows them, but he does the work.

 

That said, I rather like his system this year. He has two outside classes that require a binder, so he ended up with one for each class. He came up with tabs for them, slightly different for each, but it's generally something like "notes," "homework," and "quizzes/tests." They all sit on his shelf above the computer, so for online classes they're right at hand, and for in-person classes he can grab and go. For the ones I'm responsible for I wrote up a syllabus with the list of assignments and deadlines. The online classes each had something like that already available, so he put a copy in each binder. I suggested for classes that have signficant memorization requirements that he could have a separate tab for that to keep those things in a "study guide" kind of format. (Classes haven't started yet, so we'll see if that goes anywhere!)

 

We've had really good experiences with binders in the past... DS's first major organization responsibility was his science fair project, and one of the things I emphasized as he took over the planning details there was to keep every piece of paper he touched. Especially with a large project like that where you're scanning through a ton of reading to see what's relevant, there's always that one thing you think "didn't I read somewhere that ___" ...and even if it seemed extraneous before, it could easily become central later. So it was essential to have a large, well organized binder where he could go back and find whatever he thought he remembered.

 

It honestly sounds like you're doing fine, IMO. The only thing I think I'd consider is whether your DS wants or needs some kind of structure that way, and if he does, figure out how much of it he's capable of establishing himself and how much assistance he really needs. But if he's doing well with a hands-off approach, there's no reason to change it now!