Planning

My thoughts on this morning's walk were considerably more . . . um . . . focused, shall we say, than yesterday.

It's the middle of August. School is going to start for us the day after Labor Day. So what is the school year going to look like for us this year?

For one thing, I'm trying to limit our outside activities. That means no co-op, at least this semester. I find that when we're running around all the time, work at home tends to fall by the wayside. They'll still have Scouts, Girls' Club, Book Club at the library, and lots of other fun stuff. (Un)fortunately, I don't think I'll be working much in the foreseeable future.

Subjects are going to include: Math, Science, History, Geography, Spelling, German, English (Lit, Comp & Grammar), Cooking/Nutrition, PE, Sewing, and Art.

Obviously, some subjects will be studied more frequently than others. Math, Spelling and PE will be every day. Cooking and Sewing will be no more than once a week (in fact, we might alternate those: one week, Sarah plans and cooks dinner, and Lauren sews something, and the next week they switch). The others will be a few times a week.

I plan to go back to my "checklist" method of keeping track of things. At the beginning of the week, they each get a list of subjects with a number of check boxes by each one, representing the number of lessons they need to get through. They pick which boxes to do every day and highlight them. They check them off as completed. They get some measure of control over what they're doing, but still have responsibility to get it done.

Through the rest of the month, I'll write more specifically about what we'll do for each subject.

Song I've most recently added to my "want" list: Coldplay's "Every Teardrop is a Waterfall."