Filing, Organizing, Seat-of-my-Pants... ???

[nikkistone]

Hi

 

I'm new around these parts and to homeschooling too! I've received most of our curriculum that we're going to use in the Fall. And I'm a planning kind of gal. I like to have things laid out (Excel is my best friend!) So I'm itching to start planning our first year of homeschooling.

 

But I've searched the boards here, and there seems to be a hundred different ways of doing things. A friend of mine plans for the whole school year. I read on here that some only plan 4-6 weeks at a time. Then I read some that do it on a weekly basis (because of getting behind due to illness, doctor appointments, just life in general).

 

How should I start out? I know my style will morph as I get my feet wet in the Fall. But should I start out with a plan? Or go more by the seat-of-my-pants (which would just be unsettling to me!)? I'm afraid if I only plan bits at a time, I'll be so overwhelmed and exhausted by the weekend comes that I won't have the energy or desire to plan for the next week or next several weeks.

 

Thoughts?

[Giraffe]

:bigear:

 

You might get more specific advice if the ladies (and gents) know the ages of your kids/where you are in educating them. Are they littles? High school? Coming home from PS or starting homeschooling fresh without the baggage of outside school habits?

 

I'm listening because I'm a little overwhelmed too, but my DD is little so we have time to get the planning thing figured out.

[laughing lioness]

Overplan and then go with the flow.

[nikkistone]

:bigear:

 

You might get more specific advice if the ladies (and gents) know the ages of your kids/where you are in educating them. Are they littles? High school? Coming home from PS or starting homeschooling fresh without the baggage of outside school habits?

 

 

Good idea! I will have a 3rd grade boy and a 1st grade boy (their little sister - 4 years old - will be joining us on Fridays). The boys have been in public school for 3 and 1 years, respectively. Not too much baggage, other than the kinder boy not really liking to work. (He was dismayed at the beginning of kinder when the teacher kept giving them work to do... He just wanted to play!)

[myfunnybunch]

If flying by the seat of your pants would be unsettling, by all means make a plan! :)

 

Just expect to tweak and modify. Don't get too thrown off if your plans don't go as expected at first.

 

Cat

[TN Mama]

I usually plan out the year over the summer. During the school year, I write our weekly plan out each Sunday evening. And I typically reevaluate over the Christmas holiday and tweak as needed.

[happypamama]

I'm a planner, even though I know it will not go exactly according to my plan. I have a general idea of what I want to cover, how many days it should take, etc. I've also left plenty of flexibility so that we can skip days as needed, or take more or less time with a topic if needed. Like, our history plans look to take about 145 days, which leaves plenty of time to spend more time on certain topics, or to do things related to government and civics during our history block time, or whatever. I do find that I need to reevaluate every so often throughout the year too.

[April Walker]

I plan each subject out for the whole year on Donna Young's semester planning forms. (www.donnayoung.org) That way I can see at a glance how much we have completed and how much we still have left to do. Then, each week, I take the next five lessons from the semester plan sheet and fill them in to a weekly checkoff sheet using Homeschool Tracker Plus. Often I will do 3 or 4 weekly checkoff sheets at a time.

 

April in TX

[Susan in TN]

I'm also a big planner and have lots and lots of Excel files, too :).

 

I tend to look at their curriculum and figure out how much we need to do each week/day to finish in a year. For subjects like math, grammar, spelling, etc., I don't make a weekly lesson plan except "do 4 lessons" or whatever. For History and Science, I'm usually more detailed and plan exactly what chapters we'll cover each week.

 

Then I also make a general weekly schedule that shows which subjects we do on what days (History on M/W/F, Science T/Th, Math every day, etc.) and then plan for a daily routine - start with piano practice, then math, then spelling, etc.

 

Hope this helps. Have fun!

[Ellie]

It depends. :001_smile:

 

When my dc were as little as yours, I didn't do any planning at all, as I was letting my poor dc recover from having spent her first-grade year in a very rigid private school. It was probably 18mos before we actually started doing things that looked like Official School Stuff.

 

Shocking, isn't it? :D

 

We had a weekly routine, which included a visit to the library and a field trip (yes, every week) as well as housecleaning and laundry. We started a Camp Fire club with a couple of other hs families. We did Missionettes (the Assembly of God girls' club) at church, and dds took ballet. In short, we weren't sitting around the house staring at each other, and dc were learning many wonderful things; it's just that none of those things looked like Official School Stuff, and they didn't require Official Lesson Planning or anything close to Excel (which probably wasn't even invented then, lol).

 

Probably the only two years that I actually *planned* things were the years we did KONOS, which you cannot pick up today and start tomorrow. I had a general plan for the whole year for that, and did a specific plan at the beginning of each month.

 

Otherwise, most things that we did I could just do the next thing, although I did look ahead to see what was coming up.

 

Do what works for you, but I always recommend that people do lesson plans in pencil and remember my friend Chris's motto: Semper Gumby (always flexible). :D

[Peela]

Many of us love to plan, love the planning part- and I was one of those. But in reality, life never works out like the plan- not in my world anyway. Thats ok- the planning helped me to clarify what we were doing, why we were doing it. The process of planning itself is very clarifying.

But then when you get up in the morning with your ideas of what you are going to do for the day...be prepared for the unexpected. Be prepared to go off on a side track, to discuss things, for maths to take twice as long one day and something else to take half as long. Its really only experience that helps you fine tune it all.

I woudl defintiely have some sort of plan to get started, though. Write down a few goals for the year, or the month. Write down what your daily structure would ideally be like.

[nikkistone]

Thanks so much, ladies! Again, I'm amazed and awed at the support here! It's so wonderful!

 

:grouphug:

 

Thanks for the wise words, suggestions, and encouragement. I can hardly wait for the Fall to come so we can get started! (I will be doing a few things with the kids this summer so as to get our feet wet)

 

-n-