The saga of homeschool yearly planning
I've been deep into planning for the upcoming school year. Yesterday I probably spent nearly ten hours working. (I'm a wee bit compulsive that way, when I have a project.) While I don't exactly see a light at the end of the tunnel, I think there is at least a very faint glow. Believe it or not, this is actually the fastest I've ever done this. Usually it takes at least two, if not three weeks of me huddled behind piles of books.
I'm not really complaining, mind you. I actually really enjoy the planning and research once I get going. Finding resources, flipping through books, figuring out the puzzle of how everything will fit together is not really a hardship since I think it's fun. I sometimes joke to J. that it's too bad someone doesn't pay me to do this as I would happily just create unit studies.
What are we doing this year? Well, last year, when we began our around the world trip, I was a little ambitious and planned to visit over 20 countries, spending just a little over a week on each one. This pace proved to be unsustainable, so we only made it halfway around, with China being our last stop. A benefit of homeschooling is that everyone won't be going on to different classrooms this year, so we can just pick up where we left off. We're only going to be visiting ten countries this year, which gives us two plus weeks with each one. From experience, I know this is much more manageable. We'll start in Vietnam, move on to India, then head to Jordan in the Middle East. After that we'll dip down to Africa and visit Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria. At the end of the year, we'll head up to Europe and visit Russia, Hungary, France, and the Netherlands. The countries were either randomly chosen because I thought they'd be interesting, or they were chosen because a chapter book was set in them that I wanted to read it at tea time.
Our world travels were incredibly popular last year, and everyone is eagerly anticipating getting back on the road. Since much of the planning for them had already been done last year, there wasn't a whole lot to do this year planning-wise. I did discover that the planning I had done, became increasingly thin, so I needed to flesh some things out. I also switched a couple of countries from my original plan because I wasn't feeling terribly interested in some of the first ones.
The other thing I realized last year, was that just doing countries became a little monotonous. At least it did for me. And I also know that the second I'm feeling less than excited about what we are doing, the more difficult it is to continue on with my plan. I've been known to ditch my well crafted plans mid-way through and do something completely different because I needed a change. (If you hadn't figured it out, I crave continual intellectual novelty.) To help counteract the probable fatigue that will kick in, I've decided to add in a second unit study that is completely different, and we'll alternate which we work on during the week. This second study is going to be all about hands-on math. We'll learn about cool math concepts, and also have a lot of drawing and art and building that coordinates with it. This is what I've spent the bulk of my time planning this week. I'm kind of excited about it. We're going to create sky scrapers with square numbers, learn to count in base 5 using money and a Japanese abacus that we'll build, play around with Fibonacci's sequence in a variety of way including poetry, and do a messy art project using right triangles. Searching for math and art projects was an eye opening experience. I think it will be fun.
I've also figured out the grammar and math texts which everyone will be using this year, as well as TM's math and science texts. Duncan completely plans his own work these days, but has asked for me to look for some type of creative writing program as well as a course in ethics. TM and I are still in negotiations about what his history/literature component is going to look like this year. We may be leaning towards early homesteaders and their literature such as My Antonia. We'll see.
The final piece of the puzzle, which is most likely going to take me another full day to put together, is creating all of the new learning boxes for R. I'm incredibly tired of the ones we've been using, and need to start nearly completely fresh to keep my sanity. Because R. tends to do better when a request comes from anyone but me (ahhh... attachment issues are so much fun), I think I'm going to pull out an old technique I came up with long ago. I will create a draw bag which contains the name of each activity that is a possibility, and each school day, R. will pull out one or two, depending. This way, we're sure to cycle through them all, and choosing the activities becomes a game and not something I'm telling her to do.
In theory, we should be all ready for the start of school next week... as long as I continue to ignore everyone and everything, and focus solely on the planning. Laundry may become an issue.
I'm not really complaining, mind you. I actually really enjoy the planning and research once I get going. Finding resources, flipping through books, figuring out the puzzle of how everything will fit together is not really a hardship since I think it's fun. I sometimes joke to J. that it's too bad someone doesn't pay me to do this as I would happily just create unit studies.
What are we doing this year? Well, last year, when we began our around the world trip, I was a little ambitious and planned to visit over 20 countries, spending just a little over a week on each one. This pace proved to be unsustainable, so we only made it halfway around, with China being our last stop. A benefit of homeschooling is that everyone won't be going on to different classrooms this year, so we can just pick up where we left off. We're only going to be visiting ten countries this year, which gives us two plus weeks with each one. From experience, I know this is much more manageable. We'll start in Vietnam, move on to India, then head to Jordan in the Middle East. After that we'll dip down to Africa and visit Ethiopia, Kenya, and Nigeria. At the end of the year, we'll head up to Europe and visit Russia, Hungary, France, and the Netherlands. The countries were either randomly chosen because I thought they'd be interesting, or they were chosen because a chapter book was set in them that I wanted to read it at tea time.
Our world travels were incredibly popular last year, and everyone is eagerly anticipating getting back on the road. Since much of the planning for them had already been done last year, there wasn't a whole lot to do this year planning-wise. I did discover that the planning I had done, became increasingly thin, so I needed to flesh some things out. I also switched a couple of countries from my original plan because I wasn't feeling terribly interested in some of the first ones.
The other thing I realized last year, was that just doing countries became a little monotonous. At least it did for me. And I also know that the second I'm feeling less than excited about what we are doing, the more difficult it is to continue on with my plan. I've been known to ditch my well crafted plans mid-way through and do something completely different because I needed a change. (If you hadn't figured it out, I crave continual intellectual novelty.) To help counteract the probable fatigue that will kick in, I've decided to add in a second unit study that is completely different, and we'll alternate which we work on during the week. This second study is going to be all about hands-on math. We'll learn about cool math concepts, and also have a lot of drawing and art and building that coordinates with it. This is what I've spent the bulk of my time planning this week. I'm kind of excited about it. We're going to create sky scrapers with square numbers, learn to count in base 5 using money and a Japanese abacus that we'll build, play around with Fibonacci's sequence in a variety of way including poetry, and do a messy art project using right triangles. Searching for math and art projects was an eye opening experience. I think it will be fun.
I've also figured out the grammar and math texts which everyone will be using this year, as well as TM's math and science texts. Duncan completely plans his own work these days, but has asked for me to look for some type of creative writing program as well as a course in ethics. TM and I are still in negotiations about what his history/literature component is going to look like this year. We may be leaning towards early homesteaders and their literature such as My Antonia. We'll see.
The final piece of the puzzle, which is most likely going to take me another full day to put together, is creating all of the new learning boxes for R. I'm incredibly tired of the ones we've been using, and need to start nearly completely fresh to keep my sanity. Because R. tends to do better when a request comes from anyone but me (ahhh... attachment issues are so much fun), I think I'm going to pull out an old technique I came up with long ago. I will create a draw bag which contains the name of each activity that is a possibility, and each school day, R. will pull out one or two, depending. This way, we're sure to cycle through them all, and choosing the activities becomes a game and not something I'm telling her to do.
In theory, we should be all ready for the start of school next week... as long as I continue to ignore everyone and everything, and focus solely on the planning. Laundry may become an issue.
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