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Planning Your CM Education Problem/Question
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I have filled in my planning charts all the way to my weekly breakdown for the first term. I really have a problem planning things that detailed in advance. My weeks are never the same and I don’t know some things until closer to that time. Just curious to know if anyone else has that situation and how you go about your planning.
Personally, I GREATLY prefer planning my full year (all 3 terms) in advance. I didn’t this year and its been our toughest year ever. I would rather take longer to finish a term, but still have the next ready to go. I’m behind the 8 ball this year because I started with only one term fully planned.
I school year round and plan 3 months of work (1 term) to be completed in 4 months time. Most often that happens without issue, but this year (bc of my not planning as well) we are about 3 weeks behind where I would like. No worries, it will all work out in the end.
I love that there are so many ways to plan and be successful. Christie has some great planning resources and is amazing in what she does. I look at her things she has shared and tweaked some of the ideas I got from them to fit my style. =)
I have to say I find it very restrictive to plan daily details for everyday of our year – I don’t know if it is a personal mental block or what.
I plan what books we are using and about where we need to be for each term. I usually don’t do daily details for a long amount of time – I am like you and there are things that we have to work around. I prefer to plan books/lessons and do the next thing when we are going – somedays we can cover 2-3 lessons and other days only one or not at all.
To combat the laxness and laziness that that could cause, I did make a schedule for the week that has all our subjects that we have to cover on each day. Then I can simply say “Oh, it’s Tuesday. We need to cover the basics, add in handicrafts, and take a nature walk.” That way we aren’t behind in our planning or achieving and we can maintain progress in all subjects.
I am less concerned about having new curriculum every year on a certain day…so will complete what I feel is necessary the beginning of the new year and then start the new one (like math or history).
I am schooling year round with a chunk off for canning/planning in July-August. I also have to say that the longer I follow the method, the more settled I feel with regards to “finding the perfect curriculum” and changing it all the time. =) Knowing my 12 year plan is a huge factor in that. I have confidence that I know where we are headed and how to get there now that I definitely DID NOT have when I first started this journey with no real ideas but the firm knowledge that my kiddos needed to be homeschooled in order to succeed with the issues we deal with. =)
I don’t know if I made sense or not, but there is something that blocks my mind when I have to get specific plans on paper for every single day for an entire year. =) My life is not in that perfect little plan (thankfully!) and I got so tired of erasing every single day. I felt defeated every time I had to adjust the silly thing. Planning the books and days allows me to make progess and feel accomplished.
Well, for us the difficulty of planning stems from appts. that pop up. I have two daughters with medical issues who periodically have appts. out of town. Then there is co-op that I have no clue if/when that will be, along with other activities that may not be planned until fall. Even some of the curriculum hinders my planning. My daughter is doing the Barton Reading System, which should take us all of next year, so I just allot a certain amount of time to work on that each day. But, Math is tougher because we are working on a special program for remediation, then we will begin another program. But, I have no clue when we will get to that, because this program we are using is done by time as well.
I have made a general plan as far as term division and how many days a week a subject will be done, but, beyond that, I’m having a hard time, because my plans ALWAYS get interrupted somehow. I’ve never been able to follow a schedule, no matter how hard I try. I’m determined to make SOMETHING work:)
Do you have advice for figuring out how many days to do each subject? I have read the blog series on planning but not the book/CD.
Thanks!
Shannon
I plan the term but have ideas for the whole year in my mind. Our days are number 1 to 5 and not Monday to Friday. So if something comes up (because life happens) then we pick up on the schedule with the next day. So we may do day 1 on Monday and have Tuesday off for dr. appt. or something and then day 2 is Wednesday. This means that the next week, Monday will fall on day 5 for that week’s schedule. And we will start a new week’s schedule that Tuesday, day 1. I keep a running number at the top of the weekly schedules for school days of the year, like days 101-105 of 180. We basically school year round and have breaks between terms, take birthdays off, Thanksgiving, Christmas and June off.
I schedule history every day because we really like it and there’s a lot you can cover. We have a science lesson from Apologia twice a week and try to have a nature study once a week. Geography is once a week with a living book and map drill. We read a composer bio. one day a week and listen to their music at lunch daily. The four R’s are done daily (reading, writing, arithmatic, religion). I schedule a light day one day a week (day 5) so I can be more flexible. This day a literature audiobook is scheduled since we will be on the go in the van listening that day. This is the day we meet the hs group and/or run errands or use to catch up anything missed that week.
@missceegee-Math is something I am just planning to work on whenever possible. My educational consultant advised me to keep it going through the summer. I guess when we get to the other program, I may still use the clock rather than # of pages.
@Shannon-I have the book and I did watch the DVD. It is fun putting it together, but getting down to specific detail (day and then time)is hard for me.
@sheraz-You mentioned having your 12 year plan. I haven’t done that, but I have been working on another year. When I mentioned that to some friends, they couldn’t believe that I was thinking about the next year already. I never did that before, but having that worked out will be a big help when it is time to purchase curriculum. Only a year or two ahead will be all I can handle:)
Well, it sounds more grand than it really is – I know what subjects we are teaching for each year, and having gained ideas about what works for us and what doesn’t I have pretty much narrowed down my choices…and some things I have been getting as I go and find them inexpensively (like Our Mother Tongue, etc). So I have a lot of what I want to use even if I don’t have the exact written plan for those 12 years. 😉
But for me that was half the battle – figuring out which subjects needed to be taught, which ones were most important to me, and which ones weren’t as important – and then figuring out what had to be taught when. Having the end in sight and on paper makes the choices a bit easier if I remember to consult that when in a buying mood… haha!
I told my husband that I was making a large poster(s) of my twelve year plan like the one in the Planning Book. I am going to hang that beside my curriculum bookcase and fill in the blanks for every year that we have the books for – like PLL for grade 2 & 3; ILL for 4-6, Write with the Best 1 & 2, Our Mother Tongue (and we will most likely need Winston Grammar for the manipulative part), and then the Epi Kardia courses. Math U See all the way through…and so on. Then when I start thinking that I need to change something or get something, I can see it all right there and save myself the stress of all this. I have already done so much research it is time to apply that to real life. LOL
Seriously, I think that my biggest challenge is the using what I have and shutting out the other stuff…if I am not using it, no matter how good it is, it becomes just more stuff…so now I have a nice stack of “curriculum stuff” that I need to share one of these days. 😉
Ditto, Sheraz! I’m definitely borrowing your poster idea, too. I’m very low-tech, plus we move a lot so it will be nice to have something tangible (and big) to take with me and be able to refer to in a researching/buying crisis. :]
Ah ha quote: “I have already done so much research it is time to apply that to real life.” Bingo! You nailed exactly what I feel/do.
Thank you to the OP for asking this; hope you also gleaned some wisdom from these great ladies.
That is a good idea, sheraz. I may try something like that. I was just thinking last evening that I should start writing down my choices for fall 2014, since I have been working on that in my mind. I’m not even good about writing a grocery list:)!
That doesn’t solve my problem for a weekly/daily schedule. I think that I will just have a chart showing what timeframe a term will be, what days I know we will break for holidays, and how many days a week for each subject. My actual daily schedule will need to wait until it gets closer, so I can see when appts.,co-op, field trips, etc. are going to be. For example, if, in the fall, we take an out-of-state trip to see our kids/grandchildren or go to a camp with a work group from our church, I have no idea when that will be. So, I guess I just need to make sure I allow for enough days to stick things like that in there. Honestly, I’ll be doing very well if I just get the work completed in each term that I have planned:)
I’m not ready to let this OP slide by. I have so many questions about planning and I’m so happy to see I’m not the only one thinking towards next year already. (Last year, to prepare for 1st grade, I didn’t plan until a few weeks before starting in the fall but I find my mind won’t stop thinking about ‘what’s next’ lately.)
I do not have a 12 year plan, nor do I plan to make one. I want my children to determine their own course of study, certainly when they are 14+ years old, but to some degree even now. Given that, would the Planning your CM Education book be of use to me? Or would you think the blog posts about that to be ‘good enough’? I don’t like to buy books unless I feel really confident in them and with this I just don’t know.
To Wings2Fly, I have read of this planning system before but I have a question. Do you designate each full day of work as ‘1’ or do you designate each subject to a number? What happens when you do some school work but don’t have a day that allows you to finish it all? Or do you usually do an ‘all or nothing’ school day and if you know something will interfere with your schedule don’t do any?
I’d love to hear of others who do some level of planning but not as ‘well done’ as many of you do. I am in a week-by-week, or really more a day-by-day, system right now which has many problems with it. I would love to do a more comprehensive term-by-term plan, maybe even with ideas for a full year, but much of what I had come up with as resources for all of 1st grade we never ended up doing/using. I changed my mind about much, or topics I thought would be of great interest to my sons over the year never panned out. I come from this highly influenced by TJEd/Leadership Education and the Reggio approach don’t pick subjects/topics unless my sons ask for them. Maybe for that I really should stick with a term-by-term planning system. BUT I would love to have it more organized than I do now because I exhaust myself figuring it out by the seat of my pants all the time. (Is that the expression??) And I think the kids suffer because it causes a lack of routine/consistency that I’d really like. So if someone has advice/suggestions to address this issue I’d love to hear it!
The boys do testing in two weeks and then we’ll be starting a whole new plan for summer so I need to figure it out!
Thanks,
Shannon
Hi Shannon – You have a lot of questions there packed in that post – I’ll see what I can do to help….
First off, Yes, I think you would find the Planning your CM eduction book helpful.
I don’t think (I could be wrong) that many of us have every detail of 12 years planned out!!! But many of us have a general plan for the 12 years… Say, for instance, I’ve decided that I want to do a 6 year history rotation, I can plug the time periods in. I hope to have my kids do at least up to pre-calculus, or maybe even calculus, so I have a general plan on what to do to meet that goal. I might feel that Shakespeare isn’t that important to my family, so I just plan to do 2 plays in High School, or whatever. You’d include anything you feel would be necessary to pass high school. But if a child absolutely hates history, but loves science and wants to be an engineer, I would take the general 12 year plan and decide what history was absolutely necessary, and what extras we could do in math/science/physics and possibly some other engineering related things. I see the 12 year plan as more a general guide. (And although I don’t look to public school much – there are general plans figured out for the student…. a general “minimum to get a high school diploma plan”, a “minimum pre-university plan (that you would modify depending on what university/program)”, generally a “somewhere in between plan”, and possibly an “advanced” plan. The students take the specific courses depending on their overall plan – and add in option courses based on interests.
So for instance – When I grew up in Alberta – the courses had a 15-25-35 set for those that will struggle to graduate high school. Then there was the 13-23-33 level courses that were the “in between” courses. And then the 10-20-30 level courses that were the university preperation courses… with a 31 level course for some things even higher (like calculus.) And then in my school there were International Baccalauriate (IB) Courses for those doing advanced work. What you did in each subject was specified. I was in the IB program – and I only got 1 option a year! (Which I filled with Physics because I wanted to be an engineer….)
But – even if you don’t want a general 12 year plan – you can skip that part of the planning book and go to planning your Year, your terms, etc.
I have done Wings2Fly’s method, and it can work well even if you only do a partial day. I think generally most people have things they do every day, and some that are scheduled only on certain days. So the question is on your partial day – did you mostly do just the “every day” things (so I wouldn’t advance the day) – or did you do mostly the “scheduled for that day” – in which case I would advance the day.
A couple of other methods I’ve seen…. The filecard system….. Take filecards and write down each subject on the number of cards that you want it done in a week…. So 5 for Math, maybe 3 for History, 1 for picture study, etc. Then take all the filecards and space them out (you could make 5 columns and figure out each “days” work.) Then put the cards in a pile (and maybe number them in case you drop them – or possibly put them on binder-type-rings….) – Then when doing school – look at the top card and do that subject. once it is done, put it to the back of the pile, and do the next one… then the next, then the next…. When you are finished for the day (whether you did a days worth or not) – that is fine…. the next day continue with the next card….
The method I’m using this year – we have a list of subjects to do each day, and then a weekly list. On the daily to-do list, there are places for the weekly subjects. So basically it looks like – Scriptures, Math, Reading from list, copywork, foreign language, Reading from list, ……… The main problem I’m finding is that my kids are leaving the subjects they don’t like until last….. and so they are the most likely not to get done….
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