Scheduling Nebel's BFSU

[amyinva]

Anyone figure this out yet? I want to plan my first few months and buy anything I might need, but find myself paralyzed by the ambiguity! I don't want to "go with the flow"chart, I want to be told the exact order! I'm such a wimp.

[Margo out of lurking]

Lol, isn't that the truth? I was paralyzed by it too. But I'm not good at getting things together on my own, so I never could actually work it out for us. If I remember though, there's a Nebel's email list (yahoo, perhaps?) that was helpful...

[Targhee]

That is one thing about the book that I think will be seen by some as great flexibility (can follow child's interests and take advantage of teachable moments) and others as ambiguity ("trying to put together a year of lessons for multiple subjects - and possibly multiple kids - is overwhelming enough, just give it to me straight!"). I was thinking about this the other day - 41 lessons covering roughly three years (K-2, and he alludes to another book that will be 3-5 or 3-8). So, if it is nicely divided that would mean 14 lessons a year (actually, one year will be 13). OK, so let's say you do a 36 week school year - that means to evenly space the lessons you would start one every 18 school days.

 

As far as order of lessons, I am one of those in the teachable moments camp and will probably plan which of the lessons we do only a week or two in advanced. I will start with A/B-1 as it is fundamental to the way we do science as well as the way we humans view the world. We have to make sense of things, classify them, associate them with or dissociate them from other things.

 

So if you're planning your first months, and you're going to do 4 lessons in that time I would suggest A/B-1, B-2, C-1, B-3 and then follow with either A-2, A-3 or D-1, D-3.