Posted in School Year Planning Ideas

That's right. I have no kids until Friday night. I thought I would be taking the time to clean up the house more indepth (I hate housework) or actually finish working on our "learning room", which is our computer room. I also have been working on making up the schedule for Chantelle's school work next year, as well as a few other things to make her school year a little easier on both of us.

Learning room plans

My plans to make up a learning room for my kids (mostly Chantelle because I think Matt is going to try out first grade at school this year) is this:

1. Clean up book shelves and get rid of things no longer used.

2. Find a new home for the train table (going into the living room so Matt can actually use it.

3. Get a desk for Chantelle (and maybe one for Matt) to use to do her lessons. I want my kitchen back! Although science experiments will be done in the kitchen.

4. Clean up my desk and make hubby clean up his. Both are over run with papers, his more so.

5. Organize books on shelves to make them easier to see and get to.

6. Set up an area (more than likely in the book shelves) to hold the school supplies we use daily (paper, pens, markers etc)

I'll be posting pictures of our room as soon as I finish it up.

Schedule

Every year I make up schedules for my kids to follow. The first year I homeschooled I made up daily ones that eventually got messed up. If we missed a day, say a Monday, then our week would be off because nothing on Monday got done and we couldn't do Tuesday's work until Mondays was done. It got very old fast.

Last year I divided up each subject into 180 days (the least amount of days we have to homeschool here in MA). So if we missed a day of the week, it wasn't too bad because we didn't have to make up work to get caught up (lots of the subjects were over before the 180 days (except math and science) so we could skip days and not worry about it.

This year I am doing it almost the same as last year, only instead of having different schedule for each subject, I am having all the subjects that need to be done on each day on one page. I am using a composition book as the schedule book. It is much strudier than other notebooks and I don't waste ink by printing out many pages into a binder.

On day one for Chantelle, for example, looks like this:

Current events

Memory verse

Copywork

Recitation

Nature Study (this gets alternated and done every other day.)

History

Literature reading

English

Science

Math

Shakespeare

 

Some days also have Logic, Citizenship or Ecconomics listed as well instead of a history reading. This might not look like alot or maybe too much, but most of these are done rather quickly, with the exception on Math and Science. Chantelle's days should be over by noon - 1pm. There are also a few homeschool group activities that she will be participating in again as well as a new one, a book group.