Many curriculums come with already planned lesson plans for the topics they cover. Some come with nothing... and you have to put together your own. Putting together your own can be daunting. Finding a blank lesson plan book that suits your lifestyle and the size of your family is key. I took my mom with me to the school supply store (we both LOVE school and office supplies) and we searched each and every book until I found this one. I knew I could adapt this book to what I needed. This book is intended for an elementary school teacher with a class of 30+kids. It had enough structure but not too much. It has worked GREAT for us!
I have used My Father's World a few years (which comes with the lesson plans pretty much covering all subjects) but last year I decided to write my own in a blank teacher's book. I picked so many different/separate curriculums that I needed them to be all in one spot for easy reference.
{Here is a blank page of my lesson plan book before I wrote in it and organized it to fit our family}
{Below are 2 examples of my lesson plan book once I sectioned it out for our three school-aged kids}
I divided the blank page up into four sections. The top section says ALL for subjects we all do together (bible, science, history, poetry). Then I have the bottom three sections by child with their letter (C, K, J) at the top of their section. I divided them up with a highlighter for easy distinction. I used this for 3 kids but you could easily fit 6 kids with this style of lesson plan book.
week 4
Notice the small orange highlighted area on the left side of the book. This is highlighting H3 (handwriting for my third grader) on a day that she used a ticket to get out of handwriting. You can view my ticket system here. I check off each line item as the child completes that subject.
week 21
This page shows that on Monday we celebrated our 100th Day of School. I didn't plan any of our regular subjects on this day.
To get started using something like the book I showed above these are the steps I followed...
Step 2: write ALL and their letter on each section.
Step 3: highlight the lines that has ALL & their letter on it. (I just noticed that the week 4 does not have the ALL section highlighted in orange. That'll totally bug me so I will probably go back and highlight it. I'm particular like that ;)
Step 4: start by adding something simple like handwriting. This is, for us, a non-crucial subject that can be pitched if the day goes wonky. By starting with a subject like this you can get something on the page because there is not a lot of searching through your teacher manual to know what comes next and you feel like you accomplished something. Other subjects take longer as you need to see what pages go with what and so on.
Step 5: continue adding subjects to each child's section for about four weeks worth of time. I made the mistake last year of adding about 6 months of their work. That was way too much. Things, at least for us, change so I did a lot or erasing and re-writing...WASTE of TIME!
For the upcoming year I am going to decide how often a subject gets put on the books for each week and write the details in for each child a few weeks at a time.
For example we will do Geography two days a week every other week (M, Th), Literature with composition guides 4 days a week (M, T, Th, F), Math 4 days a week (M, T, Th, F). You'll notice that I keep skipping Wednesdays...that's because we won't be home that day at all. We will be in a co-op and at other classes away from home from 9am-2:30p. On a day like this I don't assign any of their regular subjects. The only thing I might add is Poetry which we listen to in the car when we drive or Story of the World (history), which we will listen to on CD this coming year, while we drive.
Listening to Story of the World is an example of flexibility for us. I know our year will be crazy with a pending adoption. If I can adjust a subject where I have to sit down and read with the kids then that is going to work MUCH better for our schedule and lifestyle. So the fact that this particular history (there are others too) comes on CD blesses me SO MUCH! I have heard great things about the curriculum. One of the things that keeps me sane is that I try to do as many subjects with THE WHOLE FAMILY as possible. For one thing I believe it builds family cohesiveness and takes less time!
My plan is that when my kids get into 6th grade they are given more responsibility in keeping their work organized. So unless you have kids in every grade from PreK-5th grade you can use this to manage their work. You can also have multiple kids doing the same work. You could put them on one line. My thought is to get my next-year-6th-grader something on a smaller scale for him to keep his lesson plan in. We'll see how that rolls out ;)
One of my goals with homeschooling and life is to prepare my kids to be independent and self-sufficient as early and as soon as possible. You can't serve God and others, using your gifts and talents, if people have to do everything for you.
Some thing I have learned about homeschooling and lesson plan keeping is that if we are ever audited a person needs to be able to look at our lesson plans and see exactly what our kids have been up to.
Well that's great but I am not going to write out Wordly Wise (or whatever the subject is) each time in my book. So, on one of the first pages I made a KEY for myself to follow. You will see on my lesson plan pages that it may say WW for Wordly Wise, BEY for Beyond the Code, SM for Singapore Math...and so on. The kids learned this code easily and quickly because I also write those codes for them on their daily work page. Anyone can look at my book and see exactly which subjects each child has for that day.
Now on to next year
This is the lesson plan book I have for next year. The layout is different (horizontal days) and the date is written at the top of each week. This book also comes with a month calendar for each month. I think I will like this as I can put in field trips, vacations and such that will span more than just a day. I really like the "month at a glance" view. Originally I liked the idea of the date already written in for this school year. Now I am second guessing it. I have a HUGE value of flexibility. Homeschool fits right into that but I can see this cramping my style. We will finally be traveling to China this coming school year to adopt our precious Aunna-baby but I don't know what week that will land. Grrr, I am such a planner. In my previous lesson plan book I would have just adjusted the date at the top of that week's work (it started blank) and then put the new date. On this one I may be putting labels over the top of the printed date and filling in my own. We'll see.
Here is the month view
I hope you find this helpful. I'm sure there are many more great ideas out there too! I would love to hear about how you organize your homeschool lesson plans. It's much more fun if we all share ideas and help each other out. You can see that I love to share what's worked and not worked for us. :)
up next...
**Which Curriculums we Have Used, Which Curriculums we Love, Which Curriculums we are Going to be Using Next Year
**One Word activity
**Make Your Own Board Games
Many Blessings!
erin
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