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

Ancient Egypt, St. Bernadette, and My Family ... What Do They Have in Common?

What in the world could Ancient Egypt, St. Bernadette, and My Family have in common? Well, they have all been a part of our second week of homeschool - that's what!

I'll start with Ancient Egypt. Our history and Bible stories coincide pretty well with each other. The first week we learned about Adam and Eve and how the first people would have lived, hunted, built homes, and traveled. This week our Bible stories expand to Ancient Egypt with the story of Joseph (and coming up - Moses) and his coat of many colors. We have also learned about how the Ancient Egyptians lived and dressed and about pyramids and mummies. Of course the boys were fascinated to learn about mummies! The house was filled with loud "ewws" and "that's disgusting" and "awesome" when we read about the mummification process and how the insides were removed and placed into jars. This discussion led us into examining King Tut's death mask. We drew and painted our version of his death mask. Check them out, they turned out so GREAT!

That's Sweet Pea's (5 years old) on the left and Boogie Man's (7 years old) on the right. I'm very impressed!

Moving on to St. Bernadette. We will be learning about a new saint each week, last week was St. Ann and this week is St. Bernadette. We watched portions of youtube videos from The Song of Bernadette and a video tour of Lourdes, France. We will also take a trip to a local church which has a depiction of Our Lady of Lourdes.

Finally, Sweet Pea has been working on family words and has mastered the recognition, spelling, and reading of his name, his brother's name, and Mom and Dad. I created a My Family book for him to read using our own pictures. The text is as follows: (brother) plays. (himself) plays. Mom smiles. Dad smiles. I love (brother). I love Mom. I love Dad. I love me. He really loves reading this book and looking at the pictures. I'm looking forward to creating a new book for him to learn next week using his new words.

We have had a very adventurous and fun-filled week! This is why we absolutely LOVE homeschooling!

Listening Comprehension

We have chosen to use the Sonlight Curriculum for the upcoming homeschool year. Throughout this curriculum we will participate in chapter book read alouds. I have been pondering how to make these read alouds interactive and how to assess comprehension.

While I do plan on having my children participate in a variety of activities to support the themes and lessons of the chapter books, I was also looking for something that they could do for each chapter. So, I came up with these listening comprehension sheets. There are six different pages of listening comprehension forms that were designed to go with chapter book read alouds in order to assess and evaluate the child's listening comprehension. These forms could also be used as book report forms. Each page has a place to record the book title, chapter, and a large box to create a visualization of events from the chapter. Each page has a different writing activity to complete for the chapter. As the parent, I will decide which page will be most appropriate for each chapter. I'm excited to begin using these forms during our new school year. At this time I think I will purchase pocket folders like these and place the forms in chapter order along with a child-illustrated cover and possibly other activities that we complete for each book. What do you think about my listening comprehension forms?

God Bless,
Kristi