As most who know me can attest, I love planning and start planning way early. But It does tend to take me a long time to work out all the details. For example, I picked out all my curriculum for this coming year back during spring break but still don't have all my plans hashed out.
I thought it might be fun to take a trip down memory lane and look at how I handle planning and how those plans have evolved over the years.
Even when Charry was just entering Kindergarten, when I first started this blog, I prepared for the entire year ahead of time. Of course that was simply picking a theme to go with the letter of the week and jotting down a few activities and web sites to go with that theme. I still have the binder with my weekly plans all neatly printed out.
For the grade school years my plans were more weekly goals than detailed lists. Rather that specifying page numbers and assignments I simply planned which books we needed to work on each day. For example we had daily workbooks which I scheduled for every day but science we only did three times a week, since there were fewer lessons. I still divided up the books and compared the number of lessons with the number of days I wanted to do school, but I didn't necessarily write each lesson down, just "science today" or "finish unit."
As the girls got older the curriculums became more intense. Each year I seemed to add a subject that needed not only done each day, but needed specific things done so that we could finish during the year. The first of these was Latin. This was also the year I started giving the girls planners so they knew what they would be doing, although I think my motivation was more purchasing these really cute planners.
With Junior High I found I was the one in need of detailed plans since Charry was working independently on so many subjects. Keeping track of what unit she was in for quizzes was much harder that simply asking questions about what she was learning. So my plans changed again, this time she had a simple checklist of subjects to do and I kept a master list of what assignments needed done. So even though I had a master plan for the year, she still got just a general schedule for the week.
With High School we are changing things up again. Charry likes to know how she is doing and what she will be doing. If she has an experiment or test next week she wants to know ahead of time. So I'm working on making an assignment list for her. This helps her know when she's gotten behind, some subjects are easier to put off than other. It also gives her an idea of what she can do to catch up, i.e. which assignments she can double up on.
So my planning has remained pretty consistent, I start early and strong. If I only plan for half the year, only half the year gets planned (that has happened twice), so I do the entire year at once. If a subject doesn't need broken up by me I just plan to do as many lessons as it has. I spend most of my energy on the subjects I have divide up. And until recently, my plans were just for me, the kids had just checklists (which I love).
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