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Just do the next thing?
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I have the “Planning your charlotte mason education” book and DVD. I’m getting stuck on step 3 where you are supposed to divide and conquer by dividing up all your resources so you know how many pages of each book to read each term. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed by this for some reason. This doesn’t seem like a big deal to do for things that have a certain number of lessons like Right Start Math, I know how many lessons I need to cover each term to finish the book. I know what books I want to read during the year, but for some reason it seems overwhelming to schedule that out so detailed. I like the idea of planning which days I will do nature study/picture study/hymn, etc. I’ve seen someone one the forum comment a few times about how she just, “Does the next thing.” Can you expand on that more? do you just start reading your literature book and when you are done pick up the next one? is that what you mean. sorry, i’m sure this is much less complicated than i’m making it.
That’s pretty much what I do. I do think it’s useful to sort of figure out how many ‘readings’ that we have for each subject, just to make sure that what i have on our reading list is reasonable for the time alotted for it over the course of the year. But I pretty much just work out our weekly schedule (what subjects we’ll do on which days and what times), and just ‘do the next thing’ for each subject – we finish one math lesson, then the next day we start a new one. We read a chapter or whatever each day in a book, and when we finish we start the next one. I may find that I need to schedule a little more detail when my kids are older, but right now (with a first grader and two tagalong preschoolers)we do most everything together, so this works for us.
HTH some,
Jen
That is where I lose it when planning too. I am not really good at planning explicit details like that on paper because everyday is different – somedays we are more interested than others, somedays I don’t feel well, somedays we have other life things going on… I think that is why I like the Organizer. I tell it I am reading this book on this day and it just lets me “do the next thing”. Some days I get to mark that we read 8 chapters… the next time I mark that we read two.
I think that you can do it either way…one reason to break it down is to give you doable things every day without the overwhelmed feeling of looking at the stack of books and thinking “ALL of them today?” – and if we are honest here, most of us probably have a day or week of that occasionally. 😉
There are several ways I have done this:
1. If we have a list of books, it is very simple to read until it is done, check it off, and go on to the next.
2. If I have 6 science read alouds I want to read in a year, I just try to pace them to make them work out. Say I have to teach 180 days a year. If I have 3 terms that is 60 days (12 weeks) per term. I can just say I want to read two each term and leave it at that.
3. I can say that we are doing science read alouds twice a week during this term. I have 2 books – 1 with 38 chapters and the other with 37. That is 75 total chapters. I would then think that reading twice a week for 12 weeks gives me 24 days. If I divide that out, I need to read just over 3 chapters a day to get that done.
Any way you choose, prior thought and planning is required to make your year successful and less stressful.
Confession time: I also have to admit that I choose our books and get it as far as how often we are doing each subject. Then I skip the last two steps in that book (although I have read it several times) and just plug in our resources in the Organizer along with the day(s) I want to do it and let the Organizer worry about it. Sometimes I will note when I enter the resource in the custom notes or somewhere to read 3 chapters per day. And if I am paying any attention to our progress, I can sort of track where we are in my head too based on that earlier researching. =)
I probably didn’t make much sense either. lol
Just thought of something else: Planning your books the way suggested in the book is probably an excellent idea if you are not using the entire book – (one division follows another) and you are just using certain portions. But even that it is doable in the Organizer.
I have a ‘do the next thing’ type of schedule as far as the schedule we live by each day/week. But I do look at all my books at the beg. of the year to figure out how much is doable to complete in a year. I figure out how many ch. or pages of each book is needed to be done for each reading just so I’ll have an idea of whether or not my schedule is too light or too heavy. So, for Apologia science I know I have 2 weeks to do a ch. and just break it down to a few pages at a time to finish in 2 weeks. Most everything else I just do by chapters…1 or 2 ch. per reading depending on length. I figure out how many readings it will take to finish all the books I want to read and make sure I have enough school days to do it. My kids each have a history and lit. list w/how many ch. to read per sitting of every book and just do the next one (their daily schedule just says history reader or lit. reader).
That said, it doesn’t always work out perfectly and that’s o.k. If we have books left at the end of the year that are important to me, I’ll just put them in their free reading basket for summer or before bed reading. HTH some:) Gina
P.S. If you don’t want to do all that, you could just buy the SCM guide, schedule some science readings, and just have a stack of lit. books to keep reading at will:)
I’m a ‘do the next thing’ gal. I don’t know if I can explain how I schedule or if anyone would even want to attempt my chaos.
Let’s take history for example. We’re finishing American History (we’re in WWII). I have a list of books to read (gathered from SCM Curriculum Guide and a few other places). We read from the read-aloud 4 times a week for 25 minutes. When that book is finished I read the next book on the list. Some days we read a bit more, some days a bit less. And sometimes we have 2 books going at a time – a historical novel like Snow Treasure and a more factual book like The Empire State Building. We’ll read for 10 or so minutes in the “factual” book and then the remaining 15 minutes in the novel. Give or take a bit. (In this example, those two books don’t match up exactly in time periods, but that was when we were able to get them both and I try not to worry about getting everything absolutely synchronized – they’ll make the connections.)
I do the same for literature, science, nature study, etc. – read the first book on the list, 4 days a week for 20 minutes, and when it’s done I move to the next one.
In another month or so we’ll be starting Ancients using the SCM Modules. I plan on following her schedule as well as I can, using 25 mintues a day, 4 days a week. If we can get 2 lessons done in that time, awesome. If it takes 2 days to get the work done, okay. We’ll work our way through it and start the next one when the first one is done.
For my overall plan I took each subject and decided how many days a week I wanted to do that subject, then how long each subject would be during the day. After that I just take the list of books (and activities, experiments, etc) and move through them. Sometimes I’ll actually use a timer, other times I’ll eyeball the clock and note when I need to stop – and sometimes we just keep going!
Heather
We just “do the next thing” around here too. I have a general idea of what books we are going to do and we just keep going. I hate the feeling of being behind or when my lesson plan doesn’t match up exactly so I don’t use a detailed plan. I do keep an eye on how many chapters are in a book and guess how long it will take. I use the library a lot and sometimes have to wait for books. We pick science books out for a few weeks at a time. Literature is finish one book and pick a new one from the list. History is the most structured since we try to read chronologically but we are pretty relaxed.
I do like to tie up loose ends before a long break. So I do try to make sure we finish any current books that will not do well with being broken in half. We have a 4 week break for the month of June and we finished most of our books up first. Our science book we let hang, and our history spine obviously but everything else we finished up.
Pacing yourself is wise, even a loose plan helps. We still have six weeks to go for our year to end and we have just the right amount of history left so my pacing was good this year. If it hadn’t been – still would have been a good year 🙂
Tara
Thank you all so much, your explanations are helpful. I especially like the idea of scheduling a certain amount of time even for the read alouds so I don’t get caught up on the page numbers, just do what we can in the set amount of time. I will have a younger one listening in, so I will not be able to read for too long in the beginning as he gets used to it. Thanks again, this is such a great forum!
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