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March 27, 2006
Less-Stress Lesson Plans
Less-Stress Lesson Plans
Summer time: I go through each of the books for the next year during the summer (I have already decided on the curriculum before summer break!) I make these tentative plans during the summer and just review them each evening during the ‘term’ to see what the next day will bring.
Numerically: This is the best way, I have found after many years of trial and error, to make for less stress schedule keeping! It took me 10 years to figure it out! Ha I find it’s much less-stressful if I’ve written my lesson plans as “Day#1 through Day#180 (or how many days you are ‘required’ to do in your state.) I found that if I had my plans listed as Monday, Tuesday, etc, and we took Monday off…I had to scribble all over my plans to rearrange EVERYTHING after that to co-inside with the actual days! Too stressful! Or else I felt ‘behind’ in the lessons if I wasn’t on the right day! Okay, lo and behold, the NUMERICAL system! If you number them 1-to-whatever, then when you take a day off you are NOT BEHIND! You just begin the next time you get together for school, with the next number! VOILA! Less stress!!!!
Take time off: These lesson plans that you spent so much time making are not CARVED IN STONE. Take time off, re-arrange, relax! It doesn’t have to be kept to. You are allowed to be spontaneous. Isn’t that one of the reasons we do all this?
Extra Curricular: On the lesson plans I try to ‘schedule’ the extra curricular stuff (spanish, art, music, pe, health) once a week, with the basics everyday.
Year Around School: This is less stressful than trying to get everything done according to the PS calendar. We did this in Honduras so that we could take breaks whenever those work-teams came to help. It actually took as an entire year to get 180 days of school in! This is a great plan, also, so that you can take more days off when you want them. Not necessarily all during those HOT summer months. It also makes for less stress because you don’t have to spend so many weeks ‘re-teaching’ those things your dc forgot during the long summer break!
Enough less-stress lessons for today.
~Betsy
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March 28, 2006 - Thanks for the tips!!!!
I love your tip about scheduling. I never thought about just listing the days as Day 1, Day2, etc. I am one who always listed it as days of the week and then end up rewriting lesson plans. I will switch over this week. Thank you so much!!!!
Pat in Tenn