Making it all work

You can see by just one glance at our plans for this school year that there’s quite a bit of creative scheduling required to make it all work (either that or I’d need to add about 10 hours to each of our days). I really wasn’t sure how it was going to work, but it is working and quite well! I thought you might like a glimpse of how all of this looks in our day…

(by the way, I’m sorry I can’t share this in PDF files…that has me stumped and I had to choose to either figure out Adobe or sleep…I chose the latter)

First, I needed a plan for each of the boys. A plan that they could each pick up and get going. Enter The Daily Grind…a checklist adapted to each individual…work they are expected to do independently is in black; work they are expected to do with my help is in purple. They may complete their independent work in any order they choose and they know that once that is all checked off, they are free to take a break. Everything in the checklist must be complete by the end of the day. I sometimes pencil in major topics or books I don’t want to forget or narration topics at the beginning of the week and after their lessons are through, I might jot down some notes (such as lesson # or topic covered) just for my own future reference. Gone are the tedious days of planning out each individual subject. Instead, we pick up where we left off. So if we did lesson 8 in math today, tomorrow will be lesson 9. The glory of planning this way is that if we need 2 days to complete lesson 8 (maybe it’s taking longer than expected or maybe it’s just not sinking in the first time through), we can easily adapt to that without feeling like we need to double up on lessons or without the added anxiety of falling behind.

So this was a good start, but I needed more…how was I going to manage the other two boys while working individually with each one? Here was my solution (By the way: 1. These times are totally approximate. I wanted to leave room in the margin…so far we’ve been finishing up each of our days before noon. 2. You can’t see the whole thing in one shot…I’m using Jing here and I can only capture so much, so that’s why it’s broken into 2 images. 3. The things marked in blue are things that the boys are expected to either do together.)

You’re probably wondering what “Together Time” consists of…I needed a bit more detail there, as well. I pencil in major books or topics to be discussed at the beginning of each week. So here’s how our time together breaks down…

I know I mentioned that for the most part, our plans simply consist of following along in the book. Some subjects needed a little more planning (like if I am not using a specified curriculum or combining more than one curriculum). I’m a pencil and paper kind of gal, so my planning for that isn’t fancy, nor is it very legible for the rest of the world, but I’m going to include a snapshot of it here ( I apologize that it’s not easily readable!). I plan in 12 week chunks (that way I only have to do major planning 3 times throughout the year) and I simply highlight subjects to be covered, books to be used and any major activities or projects to be completed.