Making teacher-planning-heavy curriculum work out in real life

[forty-two]

I'm really attracted to highly flexible curricula that offer a stream-lined list of concepts with teaching suggestions and otherwise leave it up to you.  I love to plan, I love to tweak, and I love the idea of having the ability to customize everything on the fly as circumstances suggest.  And before I started officially hs'ing dd7.5, I accumulated several of them.

 

And then I started hs'ing for realsies, and came to realize there's a lot to be said for open and go ;).

 

Only it turns out dd7.5 is not an open and go child.  We can do something as written for no more than a week before it no longer fits even a little bit and requires modifications.  And as it turns out, I'm not all that great at wantonly mangling the careful arrangement, and end up dropping it and winging it for a while.  But straight winging it feels too haphazard, and we don't progress much.  And so I go back to the open and go structuredness, all nicely arranged for me, and dd meshes well with it for a few days and then starts rapidly not meshing until I give it up again and go back to winging it. 

 

I really do need a flexible, responsive loose structure, and I actually own many such programs, as well as even more resources to use as a spine to make my own.  But I haven't been able to make them work so far.  How do you make teacher-planning-heavy curricula work in your hs? :bigear:

 

ETA:  The particular planning-heavy thing I'm thinking of right now is to teach from the SM textbooks and do a MotL-style 5-a-day review instead of the workbooks.  Trying to figure out the practicalities of that.

[MamaSprout]

What I do for a "Singapore Math with other stuff" math plan is list the daily lessons from each resource on a spread sheet with the pace at the top. (Do at least one from each resource each week for a total of five checks or whatever.) one column for each book.

 

All of our other subjects are on a spreadsheet with book across the top (this is important) and weeks down the side. That way if we get "behind" the spreadsheet still functions as a do-the-next-thing checklist. I also stick in info for outside activities to keep the schedule do-able. I just redid ours for our last 12 weeks and into summer. Keeps me sane. I have a homemade language arts weekly assignment check list and the math sheet for each student. I'll probably do a WTM style history assignment sheet for next year, too.

[MotherOfBoys]

That's what I like mm for. It is a framework math curriculum that is cheap enough that I don't feel bad accelerating through things that don't work and aren't needed. I mark the off and come back to it later if we need it. It gives me the topics so I know what needs to be covered and then how I could cover it. SoTW I can do this with also.

 

Having understanding of the subject, being comfortable with it, and knowing the end goal to some extent probably helps.

 

I haven't found a LA curriculum that works like this. I'm currently looking for science too.

[MamaSprout]

Just as an aside... At 7 with my dd we needed to determine what structure worked for Mom with some regard to her learning style and stick with it. I was clued in that she knew that if she fussed it would be time to try something new. So we don't worry about perfect fit, we worry about getting done what we choose. The next year we finished everything we started and then some.