Planning, Planning, Planning

We took the month of June off for the sole purpose of planning. If you are connected with me on Twitter or Facebook, you have seen the updates-

“Making copies. I'll be doing this until I run out of ink-or paper. May be soon.”,

“Year mapped out, almost finished with lesson plans for science for the whole year.”,

“Science finished. Tomorrow- plan the year of history :)”

And so you asked for a post that detailed how I am planning our year. It is much different from the last two homeschooling years-I hope I have learned some things! Without further ado, my planning process:

1. Schedule for 2011-2012

I sat down and decided our schedule. We have moved into a year-round schedule, and we decided to keep it. We will have school Monday through Thursday with a couple of short breaks. Our family just doesn’t do long breaks well-we lose our schedule and motivation.  These 4 day weeks translate into 45 weeks of school.

• July 5th- School Year Begins
• August 18th- Birthday Off for Christian {all other birthdays are ironically on weekend}
• November 23-24th- Thanksgiving Break
• December 26-29th- Christmas Break {the rest of the holiday is on a weekend}
• May 31- Last Day of School 

This schedule gives us 185 days, so we can have 5 free days, or finish a week earlier next May.

2. The printer is my BFF

I started making copies. Lots and lots of copies. I made copies for planned curriculum for the entire year. I ran out of ink, and then I ran out of paper. Rick brought my wireless printer downstairs to my desk, so I could oversee the hundreds of pages printing.

3. Putting It All Together

This is where the real planning started. I was left with this:

My planners, totes, binders, curriculum, and some of my copies.

I decided to go one subject at a time, and sat down with our Zoology from Apologia, my Well-Planned Day, and my favorite Frixion pens. {They erase with friction and are perfect for my planner if I ever need to make changes, write very smoothly, but do run out faster than most pens.}

Keeping the 45 week schedule in mind, I take either the number of lessons in the curriculum or the number of pages {as with zoology}, and determine our workload.

For zoology, we need to complete 5 pages per week, giving us plenty of room to do the extra activities, as well as the notebooking pages I purchased for the year. Although I haven’t read every lesson yet, I did skim and scan each page, and noted which activities we will do. I also made a list of items needed for those activities.

I then planned our history this way, using the week approach instead of pages. I will play grammar and math by ear, as I think getting the concepts mean much more than finishing a certain number of lessons or pages.

4. Filing

I then filed my notebooking sheets into the correct week in my file system.

These are my notebooking pages for zoology, as well as my coloring pages for The Mystery of History 2.

To make sure I stayed on track, I wrote which week of 45 we are in inside my planner, as well as days off, so I wouldn’t accidentally schedule work for off days.

5. Binders

Each child has a color forever {hope they chose wisely} for an easy visual reminder, with matching sharpied labels. They were able to customize the covers themselves for a little fun.

These binders will hold all of their work for the year. Since I spent $70 on pretty binders, I decided to go the cheap route for the inside! I 3-hole punched cardstock, and used Post-It tabs to make the dividers.

And, since you guys keep asking, I will again share my big filing/storage crate with you.

The Desk Apprentice™ Rotating Desk Organizer from Staples.

You can buy it online, but it is much cheaper in-store. And as a warning, this thing is handy, but has a large footprint. Keep in mind as well, you will want to have room to spin it.

As for the planning- I still have character training and scripture memorization I need to plan for the year. I will probably find more things to print, and need more ink and paper. My style of using the planner is going to be different than the past, a big change will be how much info I record. Last year, an entry was very detailed for each day. This year, they look like this for the week- “Lesson 2- cover pages 21-25, notebooking & go through field guide”-which gives us much more room to do the extras we missed out on this year, as well as freedom.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask- I will answer within your comment in case others have the same question- so please make sure Disqus has your email, or check back later. There are links within this post for you to peruse, but none are affiliate links, and I will not benefit from them in any way.

In the next post, I will be going over record keeping for the year, which has been a problem for me in the past.