Lesson Plans / Daily Routine Schedule / Both ?

[Aloha2U]

So I'm curious... do you create a schedule for your homeschool lesson plans (be it yearly, weekly, daily) and just have a mental plan for your daily routine... or do you also plan and create a schedule for your daily routine as well... or are they one in the same?

 

Please share with me what you do as I am very interested to see how others plan their days.

 

Melissa

[hsmamainva]

I type up weekly lesson plans, that are then broken down into daily plans for that week (there are 36 weeks altogether, simply because we use Sonlight and that's the way they break it down).

 

For each day, I'll have something like: Math - Lesson 12; Sonlight - Week 3 Day 2; etc., etc.

 

I don't have it broken down into "times" because our schedule each day differs (my husband runs a business from home and there are days when he needs us all - children included - to help out and then when school is completed is based on that....my oldest takes classes at the community college two days a week, so that has to be worked around also, etc.)

 

We do have a pattern of doing school. My kids like to do math first, then language arts, then art, then history, and then science. But I don't have a 8:00 - 8:30 is math, etc., type of schedule.

[Mrs Mungo]

I don't make lesson plans, I just have a general plan we follow each day. We *do* have a daily schedule because it became really necessary as my kids got older.

[Lolly]

Daily schedule/routine.

[laughing lioness]

Our daily routine: up, eat, a.m. jobs, sit down at the table together for memory work and stuff we're doing together. This usually takes us to noon. My dh works from home 3 mornings a week so on those days I usually make a decent lunch. Then I usually check email and the Hive and try not to get caught! Afternoons consist of reading outloud, going over work with the older kids, gardening, listening to CD's. We continue jobs (laundry and pick-up), Latin cards, etc.

I plan our school year heavily in the summer. I use Donna Young's goals form which lists subject, goals and curriculum. I have this in the front of a school planner in which I write down what we've done as we do it. I have a well-laid plaln in my head, but there are a lot of details so it's more for my own accountability and to make sure that we've touched on everything I want to work on during the week.

Friday's are co-op days and we get a lot of subjects done on that day. The bulk of memory work, writing, math, history and geography are done M-Th.

[Greta]

Personally, I have found that trying to plan day by day just doesn't work well for me. That's just me. I like to make a checklist for the week. Now, the checklist will include, for example, five math lessons, which obviously means we have to do math every day! But if I have a science lesson scheduled for Tuesday, but it turns out we're in more of a history mood that day, then I get befuddled by messing up my perfect schedule. So I just make sure we have adequate history and science planned for the week, and we do them when the mood strikes.

[Cricket]

I type up weekly lesson plans, that are then broken down into daily plans for that week (there are 36 weeks altogether, simply because we use Sonlight and that's the way they break it down).

 

For each day, I'll have something like: Math - Lesson 12; Sonlight - Week 3 Day 2; etc., etc.

 

I don't have it broken down into "times" because our schedule each day differs (my husband runs a business from home and there are days when he needs us all - children included - to help out and then when school is completed is based on that....my oldest takes classes at the community college two days a week, so that has to be worked around also, etc.)

 

We do have a pattern of doing school. My kids like to do math first, then language arts, then art, then history, and then science. But I don't have a 8:00 - 8:30 is math, etc., type of schedule.

 

This is what we do as well--weekly plans with no set daily times because we also work from home and we can't stick to set times. We are using Ambleside which already has weekly schedules on the website. I have a daily schedule for each child (like Mondays is Bible, Math, Copywork, Spelling, History, Literature and Music; Thursdays we do Bible, Math, Copywork, Spelling, History (if we had four lessons that week), Literature, Art and Geography). I made notebooks/assignment books for my three oldest. (My 5 yo dd has one too so she can check off our Bible readings and the songs we listen to.) It is divided into subjects and the kids know to do the next assignment on the list. I posted about the books on my blog. It really helps keep us on track.

[elegantlion]

We do lesson plans for school. School is very structured for us. Life, however, is not so structured. Daily routines outside of school make me feel confined. I like thing a little more spontaneous.

 

My only structure is to clean what is dirty, put away what is out, Saturday is chore day and I start laundry on Monday.

[sassenach]

We have a loop chart. It's a basic list of all of our subjects for the week. Within each subject, we just do the next thing. The loop chart keeps us from dropping any one subject over and over.

 

Any stricter of a schedule wouldn't be effective in our family.

[mommylawyer]

I have a lesson plan form that I fill out in pencil the week before. As far as the daily routine - because it's habit, I don't write it down.

 

If you want to see my form, it's on my blog on the right column under My Documents. The post is My Lesson Plan Form.

[philda62]

I do a yearly schedule with 36 weeks. Then we follow it as life dictates. I know where we are starting and when we are finished and try to stick to it on a weekly basis. We do 180 days more so than Week 1 Day 1. If we are on Day 7 and Day 8 we are sick then we just skip that day and count Day 8 when we are better. Clear as mud?

[RoughCollie]

We have a schedule. As much as possible, I try to schedule the same activities at the sames times every day. I do that because my kids prefer it. I schedule sleep time, outside activities, travel time, bath time, and meals/snacks before I plug in anything else. I end up with a table with columns for the activity, the hour, and columns for me and for each of the kids (since their activities and schools vary). It comes in handy for me because I can see immediately when I have time to run errands or do housework and cooking. I no longer over-schedule myself because, even on paper, I cannot fit more than 24 hours in a day.

 

I make 180 lesson plans for each subject. As the kids complete a lesson, it is checked off. They may do more than one lesson per day and finish a course early, but that never happens.

 

The reason I do numbered lesson plans is that if something happens to mess up my plans, I do not have to re-date my lesson plans.

 

Each kid has a complete set of one semester's lesson plans in his daily work binder, each filed behind the course tab.

 

This is a lot of work for me, but I try to get it all done before school starts and it makes the school year easier for me.

 

RC