Do set goals for the school year? If you do, how?

[melissel]

Until now, I've just been coasting along using the curriculum as my guide. Our goals were to finish what we'd chosen with a reasonable command of the subject. But now that we're getting closer to the end of the grammar stage, I'm starting to rethink the goal-setting thing. If you set goals for your school year, how do you do that? How do you know what's reasonable and what's not? Would you be willing to share your goals?

 

TIA!!!

[Hunter]

Melisa Neilson taught me how to plan out the year with this youtube video. All you need to purchase it a large piece of paper that you fold up as directed. Her method is ingeniously simple.

 

 

[rafiki]

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[NanceXToo]

Our goal is to just finish our chosen curriculum, read a lot of books, and do lots of fun activities and field trips and so on in between. :)

[boscopup]

I guess I have overall goals in the back of my mind, though I've never written them down or anything like that. For example, I know my son's weakest thing is writing - the physical act of doing so. I have chosen curriculum (and a general "how to teach writing" philosophy) that fits him and helps improve this issue. I periodically think about it and ask myself if I have him writing enough each day - is he ready for me to add in a little extra to push him just a tad? I know immediately if he's writing too much ("My hand hurts!"), but it's harder to tell if he's not writing enough. :)

 

Other than that, I am pretty much following overall WTM guidelines for where a child should be at a particular point (easier to do since we started in first grade, even if it was halfway through... if I started later, I would have had to adjust my expectations). I've chosen curriculum that gets us where we want to be, and I try to stay on track with that (so far, I've done fine with staying on track... we'll see what happens when I'm schooling 3 though!). Again, I periodically think about where we are, how it compares to the guidelines I've chosen to follow, whether we need to add something (like I slacked off on doing narrations across curriculum for various reasons, and now I'm making it easier to remember to do that, as I think those narrations are incredibly valuable).