Done! Done! Done!

I'm happy to report that we will be able to start school (next week) as I have finally finished getting everything ready. It feels so... freeing. I have now emptied huge amounts of ideas and thoughts and planning into my trusty spiral-bound notebook (nothing but the best in planning tools around here), and I can think about other things again. Seeing it all written down and organized, there is always a small part of me which wonders that such a huge amount of work can take up such a small amount of space. Among the things I've done over the past few weeks:

  • Planned out our Ancient Greece study
  • (Re)taught myself basic chemistry so I could make a plan for teaching it to my children
  • Discovering we needed something to fill the last month and half of school, so came up with a third study... architecture, focusing mainly on modern architecture
  • Planned the architecture study
  • Ordered the book and supplies we will need
  • Made a list of the library books and various movies/documentaries we will need to check out or rent, and when we would need them by
  • Made a list of the more common supplies we will need for chemistry and various art projects and the date we will need them by
  • Figured out the order of our read alouds for teatime so they correspond with what we are learning about
  • Wrote to get more information about scheduling various field trips
  • Created two new activity boxes for R.
  • Adapted an old activity box to be a new activity box to help H. with grammar
  • Researched and bought a couple of games to go along with Ancient Greece
  • Made a schedule of our school day
  • Made and collated copies of various coloring and activity pages that will be turned into lapbooks for Ancient Greece
  • Prepared binders with lab pages for chemistry
  • Added in some art and poetry to our chemistry study
  • Figured out what book to use for cursive and ordered that
  • Picked which artist we would focus on for our picture studies this year (Van Gogh)
  • Researched and found a few art projects which are just for fun
All of that took over a month to do, but I had over three days each week where I couldn't work on it. It was mostly done on the weekends. It also made a terrific mess. By the end, you couldn't see the table and you couldn't walk across the floor because it was literally knee deep in books in some parts. I had piles of papers and books everywhere. Today I was able to get it all sorted out and put back to rights. I've put away all the Egypt things I had out from last year and replaced them with Greece and chemistry. I've dusted and organized the shelves and drawers I keep homeschooling things in. All the books we will be using this year are together on one shelf. And my IKEA bag is repacked with the year's current schedule and books we'll be using everyday. (I keep my schedule, commonly used books, small white boards, dry erase markers, base ten blocks, and unifix cubes in an IKEA bag because we work downstairs in the living room, but store things in the studio. It's just an easier way to contain everything, and then I have what I need on hand.) Everyone's new supplies are labelled with their names and are ready to go. 

We're all set for school to start the week after Labor Day. About that. We have a family wedding this coming weekend. It didn't seem to make sense to do our museum trip on Tuesday, have one day of school, and then stop school for wedding events. There's not a lot of momentum there. So, we're pushing our school start back a week. Because we can. Everyone was disappointed that we weren't starting on Tuesday. And I mean that literally. All of them are very eager for school to start. They are looking forward to having a routine again, and they are genuinely eager to dive into our unit studies. They watch the new books arrive in the mail and can't wait to open them. Here's the one that came today.



And with that, we can all say good-bye to the endless school planning posts until next year. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty darn relieved.

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