Free shipping on USA orders over $129!
Sarah Mackenzie's Spiral Notebook idea
- This topic has 16 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 8 months ago by
.
- Posts
I recently re-watched and re-read Sarah Mackenzie’s post (http://amongstlovelythings.com/spiral-notebooks) on using spiral notebooks to make daily checklists for her students……I want to try it.
But the perfectionist in me is saying that 1) I hate spiral notebooks – they get all messy and pages fall out and 2) if I use a composition notebook, then I can’t pull out the pages and re-use the composition book when I fail at doing this for even one fourth of the school year.
Also, my third daughter (Age 8) really enjoys seeing what she has to accomplish in a week, and working at things almost as she wills. (She is forced to do math every day and to read every day — most other things, I let her do willy-nill thru the week.)
Any suggestions?? Affirmations?? Encouragement?? 😉
We started toward the end of last school year with this method. I decided to use composition books. We will pick up where we left off in the same comp book for the fall. This method worked well for us.
If you have misgivings then maybe it’s a not for you? Personally it is not for me. 9 kids – I’d go crazy writing it all out by hand over and over and over. I print out a weekly assignment page for each kid and they run with it. It helps keep us all on the same page and accountable. My high schooler gets a weekly assignment sheet from me but some of it she fills in herself (she has work for outside teachers and she has some flexibility in her home planned studies to decide how much to do each day to complete all the work I’ve assigned for that week. We have a daily tutoring time working 1 on 1 that she prepares for so I know where she’s at.). The other kids do the work as assigned, and we have daily 1 on 1 time to check in with each other.
I wouldn’t be able to handle this daily. I have a general plan for the year and the resources we will use and plan a little more specifically by term. But our schedule has been done weekly on an excel spreadsheet for years.
This next year, we will be using planners I found at Target for $3 near the entrance at the $1 area. I am going to try that so I can get away from the computer. It has ba section in the front with each month and I can have a general plan for the week there so older students can plan out their week more themselves. Otherwise, I will be filling it in one week at a time. And there is a list in the back to fill in extra reading. It is spiral bound and will work better for us than all the loose printouts of spreadsheets that get lost.
I want to add a first day of school picture and one at year-end, plus pictures of a few special field trips mid-year.
I did like the idea to put a check box at the end to indicate that the assignment is not really done until mom sees it…like oral narrations.
I use the grid that Lindafay has on her site, which is charlottemasonhelp. It is very plain, no frills, day one, day two, etc. for a twelve week term. I can either pencil in what I want read, narrated, etc., or I type it all in (which is neater). Put them on clipboards and that’s that. I have to be able to “see” a whole weeks worth so that I can plan “life” around school.
I would go nutso and I only have 3 dc. They would be on me waiting for their lists and if they couldn’t get started til I was finished, it would be mayhem. Plus, the stress of having to do that each night would be too much for me to handle. I’m getting a headache just thinking about it!
But, who knows, maybe it’s the right method for you 🙂
ETA: the grid I use has check boxes so I go over those each day, or so, to see what they did. And, if there was an O (for oral narration) or a W (for written), I usually ask to see it or hear it 🙂 I also add how much time should be spent on the subject or how many pages, etc., so they have something to go by and they have their timers. And, I add if the book is on my Kindle, ipad or an audio book, mostly so I don’t forget, but also so they can just get at it and not have to interrupt me if I’m working with another child.
I tried to do something similar with a weekly schedule and it drove me nuts. If for some reason I hadn’t gotten the schedule done before Monday am, the 4 kiddos couldn’t really accomplish what needed to be done and with life being what it is, sometimes we would lose a day before I had a chance to map out what needed to be going on.
I eventually made a weekly grid with Day 1, Day 2, etc. Each day is color coded and I made their lists for each day for the entire week, along with the amount of time to spend on each subject. As we finish each thing, we make a diagonal line through it and I save them for our portfolios/records. This works really well for us because we are the kind of people who work our way through the books as written, so the kids never have to skip around in books themselves. I do that in our family subjects or Morning Basket or whatever name you call those subjects in your family. Here’s a blog post I wrote about it:
https://mysouldothdelight.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/woo-hoo-a-simple-weekly-planner/
The plus side of daily writing is that you can go the speed of the individual’s needs. If you are with the kids for the end of all their work, and if you don’t mind writing the same things over and over daily, it will probably work for you. =)
I also think it sounds neat but could not implement it for our family. I actually don’t really care for spiral notebooks because they get messy for my kids. Their piano lesson schedule (that the teacher fills out for them to complete) is a bit of a mess, and the pages fall out. And it is not used nearly as often as a school schedule would be. I also would not want to have to write schedules every day.
I made an xcell spreadsheet. Down the left it says subjects and across the top days of the week. I print out quite a few at a time and spend 15-20 minutes filling out the schedules for 3 kids on Friday afternoon. All I have to do is enter the lesson or page number. The kids then have a weekly check list that they can check off. I only fill out one week at a time in case we miss a day, or a lesson on a specific day, I don’t have to correct future plans.
I think for some families it works great. I have a friend and she schedules as they go, so she doesn’t write it down until completed in a spiral notebook. It works for her 🙂 I prefer to have our week scheduled that way the bigger kids can get going on some tasks while I work with the little one.
I have my plans typed out for the entire year. However, I’m only printing 6 weeks at a time. That way I can make changes as we go without too much hassle.
The spiral notebook idea wouldn’t work for us. I did try writing out our “summer school” plans and like it okay, but we only had a few things to do each day. I can’t see it working for us with a full day of plans.
See? You all have been so helpful!!! Thank you!
I was hearing the siren song of “different from what I did last year; everyone else LOVES it……” but was having trouble envisioning us being able to use it.
And you all have shown me that not everyone loves that method of making checklists……and that what we did last year (similar to what some of you do) will actually work just fine for the year.
Thanks!
We use basically An open ended planning page that I typed up and bound. It has our week long schedule by subject. But it says , history______and I write in the lesson number. It just lists each subject and then I can sit down for 5 min and write in what we are to do. This way if we don’t get to science one week I don’t have to redo my whole planner. I just x instead of check and we do that lesson the following time it is scheduled.
I did use it last year and loved it. I really thought I wouldn’t but it worked well. We have 9 kids. Last year 6 were school age (1 was college but lived at home, 1 a toddler-preschooler, 1 a newborn)
I found that it only took about 15 minutes each day to write out the next days assignments (I had a planning page that I worked from to help me know what to put down).
The best part, for me, was being able to adjust our daily schedules when stuff came up which it seems to do frequently. If we had a medical appt or “have to do now” errands, I could just adjust the schedule as I wrote it down. When I used to do weekly schedules and something came up, I had to tell them what to cross out and what to move to another day. That was much more of a pain than the 15 minutes it took to write it out each day. When they finished a task on their sheets, they highlighted it so I knew at a glance whether they had finished or not. My kids preferred them also.
I did find it helpful to have an schedule notebook for me too. That way I knew who needed me and for what subjects so I could make sure to get those in when it worked best.
As far as the messiness of spirals, I didn’t find it to be a problem. The notebooks were slightly beat up by the time we were done with them but it wasn’t bad. Since we only wrote on one side of the page due to the highlighting, the books didn’t last all year so maybe that helped. Since it wasn’t something I was keeping once the year was over, I didn’t worry about it too much.I have been using this for about a year now. I only have one kid I’m doing it for though as the others aren’t old enough. I like it. It is adaptable, easy to change, and keeps a record. My daughter likes to check things off it. If something comes up and we don’t get to something that day, I just cross it off. I still have our schedule (our everyday subjects plus our loop schedules) posted on our wall so my daughter knows basically what to expect.
I’m using it this year with 2 kiddos…both emerging readers. We review the list in the morning and throughout the day. They aren’t doing too much on their own yet so we don’t have too many “lessons” to fill in so some of it is just accountability for their chores.
For example, ds8
dog breakfast
piano lesson 6
blanket time with sibling
copywork
trash
sweep kitchen
read to Daddy
and a checkbox next to “mama approved” at the bottom for me.
They love to see it. There are some nights that I don’t feel like doing it but it’s holding me accountable too.
I tried this last year with my two oldest kids and liked it. I liked the flexibility when things happened, or didn’t happen. But I am trying printing out weekly schedules this year because I got tired of writing the same thing over and over, just with a new lesson or chapter number. I’m putting only their independent work on these lists. I made my weekly schedule pretty generic: MUS page ____, ELTL book chapter ___, etc. So I can fill in page and chapter numbers each week, but don’t need to change anything on the schedule before printing. This should also make it pretty flexible if we don’t get to something. All I have to do is adjust the lesson number. We shall see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out, then I’ll go back to the spiral notebook lists.
Here’s a thought. What about spiral index cards? I fill out index cards (I call them work cards) for each of my kids for the week. Just one card for each kid and tucked into a business-sized envelope taped to the wall (holds 3 cards sideways). Since we do most lessons and enrichments together I don’t have to write those things down but for math, science and language arts they need a little direction. They cross things off (or I do) as they go along. If we leave for the day to have a field trip or something it’s easy to see what’s been missed and I can add it to next week’s card. Since spiral paper notebooks fall apart this might be a sturdier way to make it work and to keep everything in one place. Also, I use a lot of abbreviations: SW (Spelling Wisdom), L. (Lesson), WN (Written Narration), etc.
- The topic ‘Sarah Mackenzie's Spiral Notebook idea’ is closed to new replies.