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No individual lesson plans for 8th grade and up?
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I will have a 6th and 8th grader next year and have decided to use SCM. I see the individualized lesson plans for grades up to 6th, and was hoping to have the same for my middle schooler, and on up into High school level as well. I can’t find them…are they available?
Right now we only have Individual Studies lesson plans for grades 1-6. We plan to add grades 7-12 in the future, but do not have a release date for them yet.
Thank you for the info. Is there any info on how to prepare and execute my own lesson plans? I am a bit overwhelmed at the thought of this task. I would love some tips on steps for how to begin.
You may already know this, but I want to make sure you have a full understanding of what we offer to help schedule all subjects a student would study for a whole year. So please forgive me if you are already familiar with these products.
We have three sets of lesson plan books that cover all subjects for a year. The history guides each contain book recommendations and lesson plans for one time period in history and are for all grades. They include Bible and geography lessons too. Simply choose the time period you want to study, gather the books recommended for family and each of your students’ grade levels, and the guide tells you what to read each day.
Likewise, the Enrichment Year guides contain material recommendations and lesson plans for subjects such as composer study, poetry, Shakespeare, foreign language, and more. The Enrichment Year guides are for all ages. We currently offer two volumes; choose one for a year of study.
The Individual Studies guides give recommendations and lesson plans for language arts, math, and science. As I mentioned above, we currently have grades 1-6 completed. For Grade 8, we recommend Spelling Wisdom book 3, grammar (we recommend Analytical Grammar), a physical science course of your choice (we recommend Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Physical Science), a math course of your choice (we recommend Math-U-See), typing, and a Book of Mottoes.
Keep in mind that the individual study recommendations for grade 8 are just that, recommendations. You are free to change any of the levels or curriculum providers to fit your student and family. For example, maybe your grade 8 student is not a very good speller and is not ready for Spelling Wisdom book 3. No problem. Just determine the level that your child would be at by looking at the sample for Spelling Wisdom. Choose the level that your child would have no more than 3 or 4 words per passage that he is unsure of the spelling. Keep in mind that each Spelling Wisdom book is two years worth of work. Substitute that level for the recommended level. Same with math or science. If you prefer math or science from a different publisher than what is recommended, use those.
So, finally, here is a sample weekly schedule for your grade 8 student for math, language arts, and science:
Monday – math (30-40 minutes), science (20-30 minutes, more time if experiments are being done that day), Spelling Wisdom (15-20 minutes, study lesson to prepare for dictation), grammar (15-20 minutes).
Tuesday – math (30-40 minutes), science (20-30 minutes, more time if experiments are being done that day), Spelling Wisdom (10-15 minutes, dictation), typing (15-20 minutes).
Wednesday – math (30-40 minutes), science (20-30 minutes, more time if experiments are being done that day), Spelling Wisdom (10-15 minutes, study passage), grammar (15-20 minutes).
Thursday – math (30-40 minutes), science (20-30 minutes, more time if experiments are being done that day), Spelling Wisdom (10-15 minutes, dictation).
Friday – math (30-40 minutes), science (20-30 minutes, more time if experiments are being done that day), Book of Mottoes (write a quote, poem, or excerpt from reading in a journal type book).
You may find this article series from our Learning Library helpful in planning your Charlotte Mason education.
I would like to chime in here with a little encouragement. It does seem like a daunting task when you are starting out with any method of homeschooling, but it is very doable. I have graduated a high schooler, and my youngest is a 10th grader. When we started using Charlotte Mason methods, my youngest was in 3rd grade. Those individualized plans were not yet available.
I didn’t really put together a fully written out set of plans, but I relied heavily on the SCM Curriculum Guide. It is just that, a guide, so over the years I have tweaked what they suggest, left out a book or two, and substituted others. For example, Sailing Alone Around the World was recommended for a particular year’s geography reading, but after a week or so, my kids just weren’t loving it. I wasn’t loving it. So, we took to this forum and asked for other recommendations. The responses gave us selections from living books to textbooks suited to a CM education. We chose to use the book Stowaway, and it worked very well for us.
Additionally, using the SCM Organizer has been a great help in planning. For the most part, I just “plug in” the books or other materials we are using, and what I need each day shows up according to the daily schedule I’ve set up. Since the main thing for us to implement CM methods has been “read and narrate,” all I really need to know for a lot of subjects is what to read on a particular day. For most subjects, it really is that simple. Again, you can ask lots of questions here for ideas of more hands-on activities, field trip suggestions, etc.
Your older student is rapidly moving toward mostly independent work, so what you need to provide in terms of instruction will vary. For my 10th grader, we read history together simply because I love history. We use Math-u-See, so we watch the dvd lesson together, but I could just watch it myself and then teach her from the instructor’s manual, but we like Mr. Demme’s corny jokes and the way he presents the material. For other subjects, she usually reads the material by herself and either writes about what she read (once a week per subject for the most part) or discusses it with me. She is mildly dyslexic, so she sometimes uses audiobooks to speed things up during the school year.
Planning is a little labor-intensive, but it gets easier year-by-year. And many of the homeschool veterans here are willing to share book lists, planning charts, etc. so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just ask and see what responses you get.
Of course, if you are a planner by nature (like me), you might find that you get to the end of your plan, and you exclaim, “Yay! I’m done! Oh, wait…..I have to actually put the plan into action now…..” Just kidding…..I like the teaching part, too.
Sue
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