Debi,
No, you don’t have to enter everything twice. You’ll enter the book ONCE, then assign it TWICE to the two different children. But you don’t have to enter it in again, you just have to assign it. It will show up on each child’s daily list. You will have to do two “check marks” as you complete different parts each day. But that is only a matter of fraction of a second. I haven’t found it difficult at all; my two older children do a number of items this way.
About the page numbering. I think you could simplify this in a number of different ways. One way would be to make your own entry–your own resource–broken up into “readings” instead of chapters. It’d take a few minutes to set it up, but once it was set up, no work. 🙂
Another thing to try–give this over to the children. You have several old enough to be given a page range for the week, then tell them to read it evenly over 5 days. You even have a couple old enough, if I remember correctly, to help your younger couple of school age children who may not yet be able to do this themselves. You could simply schedule the reading once a week, on Friday, say, but tell the children to break it up into readings and read each day and then notify you when they met their Friday goal of however many pages.
Another thing you could try, and this what I settled on myself. Instead of following a set chapter or whatever, I just assign by PAGES. I find this works extremely well for, say, the Genevieve Foster books. I figure out once, at the beginning, how many pages a week I’d like read. Then I tape a sticky on the front of the book, “Four pages a week” Then I give each child reading the book, a different color sticky-tab to use as a place marker. I don’t make separate notes or anything; when a child finishes a chapter or a section, I tell them to notify me. Then I just check that off at once. I don’t always know exactly WHERE they are in the middle of a long section or chapter, unless I get out the book and look, but I’ve found I don’t really need to know this, as long as I know when they finish a section; the record keeping of that seems to be enough to let me know they are progressing.
Do any of these ideas help? If not let me know, I have a couple more “cooking” up there but those were the simplest ones.
Michelle D
