Tuesday, July 30, 2013

How Do You Plan?

We, at Country Homeschool, have already started our new school year; however, I know that many are still in the planning process. So, to backtrack a little bit, I am going to explain my planning and scheduling process for our homeschool year and I will be sharing some of the documents I have created.

I started the planning process by creating our school calendar. Last year, we pretty much went the entire year with very few breaks and by March/April I was feeling the burn-out and I know the boys were, too. So, I am going a different route this year. We are going to be in school for about four weeks at a time with a week long break in between. This will allow us to schedule appointments, field trips, and just a bit of a breather to REALLY evaluate how things are going all while being able to address some vital "me" time!

We decided to try out the Sonlight Curriculum this year. This has allowed me to have a lot of planning already completed. Yeah! However, it did leave me with four separate planning pages (core, science, LA 2nd grade, LA kindergarten), plus math, extra-curricular, and the extras that I will be throwing in. So, I decided to create an all-in-one form where I can plug in our Sonlight lessons along with everything else. Here's a freebie of my lesson plan form!

As for documentation, in our state we have to document hours in the core subjects (language arts, math, science, social studies) and total learning hours. So I created a daily time log for each subject and labeled the core subjects and I also created a log for our weekly hours. Here is a sample of that:

Weekly Hours


2nd Grader
Kinder
Core Subjects


Extra-Curricular


Religion


Life Skills


Other


Total Instruction for the Week



Pretty simple! I love that I have been able to free up a lot of time by having almost everything planned in advance. It takes a little bit of nothing to make a few copies and finalize our weekly plan which means I have more time for fun and family. Love that! I hope that my ideas for planning can help you out a bit, too. 

God Bless!
Kristi

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