I am new to SCM although not new to CM in general. I was just wondering what is the difference between the book Planning Your CM Education and the CM Organizer? Do I need both? Do they serve different purposes? Is the book for planning and the Organizer for record keeping? Or is the key difference that one is in a book format & one is online? I am currently homeschooling 6 of 8 children with baby #9 due in mid August. So I am really needing to keep it simple.
Hi, Angela, and welcome. Congratulations on blessing #9!
The Planning Your CM Education book helps you figure out what you want to teach in your family, which resources you want to use, and walks you through laying it all out in manageable chunks, including helping you design a weekly flow chart and a daily schedule that will work best for your family situation. It shows you how to come up with a plan for your year, term, week, and day.
The CM Organizer takes all your information and hands it to you one day at a time. You tell it which books you plan to use for which children or the whole family, and it helps you track where you are in your plan. As some children work ahead or life happens and some things get pushed to the next day or week, the Organizer automatically adjusts assignments for you so you don’t have to erase and reschedule everything. It also lets you run reports of all the work you’ve done or are working on.
Okay….so if I choose my history selections, selections for poetry, geography, nature study, science, grammar, etc…does it actually schedule all of this out for me over the course of a year?
A more specific question…what if I choose a science book to be read twice a week, a poetry book to be read once weekly, and a Shakespeare selection to be read monthly. Does the CM Planner schedule this out for the year?
The Planning Your CM Education book will help you determine how many days per week you need to do each subject in order to get through the resources you’ve selected. Once you know that information, you can enter it into the CM Organizer.
So, for your example, you would find the science book you want to use in the CM Bookfinder and click Schedule It, then click the little checkboxes to tell the Organizer which student (or the whole Family) will be reading it, which school subject you want to use it for, when you want to start using it, and on which days of the week you want to use it.
You would do that for each resource you want to use. Then the Organizer would put together all that data and, on Monday, show you your list of assignments for that date for each student/Family. You simply check off whether you Worked On or Finished each assignment (or ignore one if you didn’t get around to it). Any work you checked off goes into your records and the next day, the assignments for that day show up.