Heather, your article had me laughing! Thank you for the realistic spin on things and the funny comments. In my mind, our school day goes this one particular way but in my heart I know it won’t happen. I like your approach. It makes me feel relaxed. I want to have fun with my children and make sure school does not feel like school. Thank you for the link to your blog. 🙂
I love reading all of these ideas. For my 5 year old, we’ve adapted the “workbox” approach for her schedule. We have an ikea shelf with boxes on it and her tasks are put in the boxes and she is required to “work” in order. Our read alouds, puzzles etc… are all in the appropriate box. Since she is young, a lot of it is purposeful play (pattern blocks, sand tray to trace letters etc…) so the boxes work well to organize things for us. My 8 year old also has boxes and I put her nature notebook, copy work etc… in it. It works well for us and my kids transition to a schedule on a white board eventually.
After all the wonderful ideas, here is what I came up with for dd6’s visual schedule:
1. I glued a small clip art image of our meals/chores/school subjects/playtime onto an index card.
2. I wrote the word (breakfast, feed the dog, make bed, devotional, math, lunch, playtime, etc.) for the picture as well.
3. Then I laminated them.
4. I will organize my cards around the activities that surround breakfast, lunch and dinner. I need to decide how to display them but I like the pocket chart Sonya suggested or wide ribbons hanging from rings and use clothespins to attach the cards. I may even glue little flowers on the clothespins if I can find something whimisical. My little one will like that. 🙂
I suspect that most of the cards will stay up all the time and I will only have to change out some of the things we only do 1-3 times a week like picture study, composer study, LDTR4C, sign language, geopgraphy, etc.
Hope that inspires someone 🙂
If anyone wants a photo, private message me and I will snap a pic of the cards. Blessings to everyone.