*Disclaimer: Homeschool laws vary country to country, and even state to state in the US. All of my posts on record-keeping and planning are based on homeschool law in the state of Georgia, USA. Please be sure of requirements in your own country/state before implementing any record-keeping system. * In my last post, I encouraged you to write down what your child accomplishes each day rather than making a checklist of things to do ahead of time. Am I telling you then to just fly by the seat of your pants? Of course not! The biggest advantage of having a teaching degree and school experience is understanding how to make long term plans and goals. Notice I said long term. It’s not so much about making a daily lesson plan; it’s about knowing where you want to get in the long run. Because here’s a little trade secret: public school teachers don’t finish everything on their lesson plan either. They are required to write them, but they aren’t slaves to them. And homeschoolers aren’t the only ones who get their lessons interrupted. When I taught, I faced the frustrating interruptions of fire drills, snow days, and discipline problems. Your child isn’t falling behind all the public school kids just because you got the flu. School teachers get the flu too, and believe me, their substitute teachers are probably just there for crowd control. Life happens to everyone. What education majors and professional teachers understand is something they call a scope and sequence. That’s a fancy term for a plan of what you want your students to cover and master by the end of the school year. However, just like the daily plans, these also have to be flexible. Flexibility: that’s the most important thing I want you to get. Here’s another professional term: IEP which stands for “individual education plan.” These are used in the school system for special needs students, but in an ideal world, every kid would have one. Guess what? You, homeschooler, are in the ideal situation to give your child an individual education plan. I write one of these up for each of my children. It lists all their subjects, how often they will do each one, what curriculum is being used, and a reading list. Here’s what my daughter Haley’s looked like last year: Haley’s Individual Education Plan 2020 / 2021 - 4th Grade Math: Math U See Delta / Test Prep and drill on Thursdays (Standardized test - Nov.) Handwriting: A Reason for Handwriting D Alternate these: Phonics: Explode the Code Six and Seven (Maybe Eight) Spelling: Spelling Workout C (Fall) and Spelling Workout D (Spring) Alternate these: Grammar: Finish First Language Lessons 4 (two weeks) Writing: Writing with Ease 2 (Fall) and WWE 3 (Spring) (one week) Literature: The Egyptian Cinderella Tirzah D’aulaires Book of Greek Myths & The Illustrated Odyssey (w/ Ian) Detective in Togas (w/Ian) Ramona’s World Voyage of the Dawn Treader (w/ Ian) From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler Charlotte’s Web (w/ Ian) Misty of Chincoteauge (w/ Ian) Matilda I wrote this for me, not to share with other people, so some of this might not make sense. However, let me try to break down some of it for you. Do you see the sections that say “alternate these”? Well, that means I alternate weeks for those subjects. I heard Sonya Shafer of Simply Charlotte Mason at a homeschool convention. The title of the session was “How to Simplify Your Homeschool.” Her talk set me free as a homeschool mom! One thing she said was that you don’t have to do every subject every day. I knew this, on some level, but I felt that only applied to the “extra” subjects. Surely I had to do all of language arts every day, right? But Sonya said to just pick ONE or TWO things that fall under language arts. Phonics, spelling, vocabulary, writing, grammar, and reading all fall under the banner of language arts. She told us don’t try to do all of those every single day. Then it hit me: I taught high school English for six years, and I never did everything everyday! Some days, I focused on literature, other days I focused on grammar, and when we were writing research papers, that was all we did for several weeks! Why was I trying to do it differently as a homeschool mom? So, my kids do math every single day, but everything else alternates. If you look at Haley’s IEP above, you’ll see that I alternated phonics and spelling every other week. For writing and grammar, we would spend two weeks on grammar, then a week on writing, then two weeks on grammar, etc. We actually do reading everyday, but that doesn’t mean you have to. (Reading is our favorite part of the day, however! I’ll write a whole post on that later.) What about history, geography, science, and the arts? We actually do those subjects together. How we do those will be my next post. Let’s get back to my daughter Haley, however. Each day, I look at her IEP. I go through the list with her, and I let her pick what she wants to do first. (Getting to pick what they want to do next gives my kids ownership and reduces whining.) As we accomplish each item, I write it down on her weekly record sheet I told you about in my last post. I do set a timer for an hour, but that’s only to make sure I don’t tax her. Once the timer goes off, she gets a break, and I work with her younger brother. After her brother has worked for an hour, we look at her IEP again and choose something we haven’t gotten to yet. Some days, we don’t get to everything, and that’s okay. We’ll just start with that subject the next day so she doesn’t get too far behind. Notice that I didn’t write down specific dates for finishing lessons/chapters. That’s because I don’t just want to cover the material, I want her to actually learn it. So if we go through the book slower, that’s okay. If she catches on quickly, and we go a bit faster, that’s okay too. The key is to have a general plan that is flexible. I hear people say that the problem in public schools is that everything is dumbed down. I disagree. If you ask teachers, they will tell you the problem is that the curriculum is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most state standards ask for teachers to cover too much, meaning they never delve deep enough for students to really master the material long term. Please, please, resist the temptation to simply “cover” a ton of material. Always ask yourself: “Is my child actually learning this? Or did we just finish the book?” Covering fewer subjects a day at greater depth will do far more long term. Doing fewer subjects a day also means we can spend more time on the one subject you really need to do daily: math. If you are trying to cover too much, you’ll speed through math and your child won’t really learn it. Remember when I said you have to be flexible even with a long term plan? Well, you’ll see above that I had planned for Haley to do the last half of Spelling Workout C in the fall and then the first half of Spelling Workout D in the spring. Things did not work out that way. Haley, who is a hands-on, kinesthetic learner, was not doing well with Spelling Workout. After Christmas, I decided to switch to All About Spelling. Because we had to start over from the beginning, and because All About Spelling recommends fifteen to twenty minutes a day, I changed her daily plan. We now do spelling and phonics every day. However, I cut the amount she does in each by half so she doesn’t get overwhelmed. We do half a lesson in spelling and one page instead of two in phonics. Isn’t it exciting that our kids can get such specialized instruction when we homeschool? I hope this post helps you plan long term for your kids in a way that brings freedom and flexibility! Next time, I’ll share how we do the other subjects.
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AuthorHi, I'm Melanie! I'm a homeschooling mom of three kids ages 13, 11, and 9. I have a BS in English Secondary Education from Asbury University plus 30 hours of gifted certification course work. I've taught in just about every situation you can imagine. Public school, private, homeschool hybrid, and private tutoring. The most important thing I've learned? One on one, individualized instruction can't be beat. Archives
July 2022
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