How far in advace do you plan? I am fighting off the urge to plan out the entire year (right now I have the "semester" done)! We dont always stay exactly on track but I do like to have a general idea of what we want to accomplish.
I do the entire school year at once and adapt as necessary on a weekly basis. I don't have time to plan during the school year. We still haven't started school yet because I'm not finished planning out the school year.
I also plan by year. I figure out when I want to start and finish, figure out which weeks I want to take off, and then see how many weeks are left (which is 30-something). I divide what we need to do by 30-something weeks to figure out how much needs to be done in a week. We get off schedule, of course, but it helps me not to get too far ahead or behind in any area. Since I plan weekly for the year, I can wait until the week of an assignment to decide which days we'll work on it. We have a million things going on at once, so I'm able to better plan around them that way. Sometimes we'll work all day long and sometimes we won't do school at all.
okay I try the plan the year out, but this year I am floudnering. I like to play basically the year but then break it down for quarters now that we are in JR high and semesters. the year would be vague like Math- 5 days week , so many months, etc, should be at unit xxx lesson ddd on said date etc. Weekly, I write up what to do, andnow I am down to Daily each day I go over where we are and write out what ds needs to do that day. He works good with a list type of lessons plan for each day.
Before school starts, I decide how many weeks school will be. Then I decide what I want to cover in each subject and try to estimate how many weeks I need for each unit of each subject so it all comes out even in the end. After it is all blocked out, I do the rest of the planning during the year. Example: For the next three weeks we are working on paragraphs in writing. I broke that down into writing process review, discriptive, and persuasive. Every Sunday night I detail out the exact goals for the week and resources I want to use. Now I am new at this, so it may change, and I only have one child to organize for. It takes me about an hour every Sunday to pull together what I need for the week.
Ok I know what I want to have covered by the end of this year ... Like I know that we will be done with Letter of The Week by December, and then we will start on more unit studies and learning to read in January.. but as far as weekly activities go, I plan those on the weekends. And I just plan one week at a time. That's just how it works out best for me.
I plan for the year by deciding our end date (the last weekday of May), and when our holidays will be (Good Friday and the week after Easter, two weeks at Christmas/New Year, the week of Thanksgiving, and Labor Day) - notice I'm going backwards? I'll also designate the last week in April, or as late as possible in April (depending on how Easter falls) for our achievement test week, which are still school days even if we don't get "a whole day's work" done. Then I go to our last day of school and that's Day 180. Then I count backwards and when I get to 1, that's our start date. Sometimes we may have to adjust during the year, like for Hurricanes Katrina/Rita/Gustave/Ike etc., or if I get the flu or something. (I can do school without dh but he "can't" do it without me! It's nice to be needed :roll Then I decide who's doing what courses and levels, and whether we'll do those together (rarely) or individually (most of the time). Then we just start. At about 2/3 of the year, I start gauging whether it's likely we'll finish the courses, or possible to actually finish the courses if we "squeeze", or whether we'll continue some over to next year, or what. I seldom write up who's going to do what - specifically - until we actually get started. Most of our stuff we do is "a lesson a day" laid out, since I'm kinda mainly a workbooky/textbooky type person. So on the first day, we kinda just look at our books and get a feel for how it's going to go, and maybe do a lesson of this or that just to get our feet wet, then we're pretty much a lesson a day for the rest of the year. However, we never know when something's going to come up, or we get a new student, or lose one, or somebody's absent, so I don't usually write down a specific plan until the day before we're going to do it. Because if I do, SOMEthing will come up to change it! Once we get a little momentum going, it kind of schedules itself and all I do is write it down.
I plan about 32-40 weeks of material based on 4 days a week (since we have co-op for 20 weeks). I have it laid out so each week I can check off what we have done and then plan what will go on the following week. It has worked so far (4 years) and sd only ran over in a couple of subjects (she was doing high school). I really need to see the whole year in front of me so I can keep myself on track.
At the beginning of the school year I have a weekly schedule as in do one math lesson a day; do grammar on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday; etc. I do not write down what specific lessons to do because life always happens and we would not be able to stick to it. I do have a lined paper that I put in front of my notebook that reminds me of specific things I want to cover. I find that very helpful. The school year is completed when all the work is completed. This may take through May or June. Over the years I have tried a number of different methods of scheduling. The one mentioned above is the simplest and works the best for us.
I only plan 2-3 weeks at a time because I hate being thrown off schedule by sickness or whatever. I just find it easier to adjust my schedule that way.
For the year: broadly. As in, I decide what materials we'll use, and then how much I want to do in each subject each week. Then we work at a pace that works for us until we finish (sometimes it takes 10 months, sometimes longer). In more detail, I "plan" once a month. I figure out how much progress we've actually made, how many activities are we handling well in each subject, and plot out what I'd like to get done in detail each week for the next month. I print out any papers I think we'll need. I also plan the activities out for four days...we always seem to need that fifth day to catch up or make something up because we got interrupted. This year (we re-start in January), I'm trying something a little different. With added non-school stuff on me this year, keeping up with the monthly planning was MURDER some months. So, I'm trying to plan the subjects in more detail - not necessarily saying exactly when each thing will be done, but putting down "on paper" what I plan to be get done in each book in each subject. I'm really hoping investing the time now saves me time later. My thought is even if I have to adapt what I've planned, I already have the framework down.
