Hi! I am trying to become more organized with my lesson planning and scheduling for next school year. This past semester I flew by the seat of my pants and planned the lessons day by day. This didn't work out too well and we always seemed to be behind. My daughter will be starting 7th grade and we plan to do the regular subjects, Language Arts, Math, Science, World History and Bible. She has also expressed an interest in Spanish. I would like to know how other families organize their school days. Do you do all subjects each day? Do you alternate subjects on certain days? How long is your typical school day?
We have some subjects we do every day, others are done weekly or 2-3 days a week. I think it depends on what works for your family and whatever curriculum you are using. Personally I see no need for an 8 year old to do history daily...so we don't Our dailies are: Bible Phonics/Reading Math Copywork (Handwriting/grammar/spelling) Poem Foreign Language (ASL) Then we fit in weeklies: Nature Study (science) Book of Centuries (History) Map (Geography) HandiCrafts Art Music Appreciation (Folk Songs, Hymns) Artist Study Composer Study
Thanks. We are going to try to fit in some Art and I forgot to mention that my daughter will be attending a weekly 2 hour sewing class. We are using Abeka for science and history, Teaching Textbooks for math, BJU for Bible, and for now we are undecided between BJU or Prentice Hall for language arts. These curriculums are designed for daily lessons but I am going to work on pairing down the history and science to maybe three days per week. I like some of your weeklies. I would also like to work in some weekly activities to give a break from the book work. I appreciate your input. Thanks.
Most curricula can be changed up some-some have very short lessons you can easily do 2 lessons/day other have long lessons that might need to be split up, that's the beauty of homeschooling, you can do that! We've done 3 math lessons in a day and we've stretched a math lesson for 3 days, just whatever works at the time. Do you have to get through a book in year? For subjects like History it might not be necessary (depending on the child and her goals) You could stretch a book to last longer if you need to.
To make a very long story short, I believe that the study of the past is critical. Therefore, we study history every day. It's a personal conviction, though, and one that most people don't exactly share (not to say they don't think history is important, only that's it's not 'daily' kind of necessary). That being said, history is the ONLY subject we will do daily this year. We're using MOH and following her general plan. Mon: pretest (for the older boys) T, W, Thu: the three lessons in the unit, with activities Fri: timelines, quizzes (for older two), map work For everything else, I divided the number of pages in a given book by the number of weeks in our school year. I got an average of how many pages per week we need to finish to accomplish our goals. In most of the books, that was 6-7 pages. 2-3 pages a day (the average lesson length) puts doing each subject only 2-3 times a week. I spread out the work in such a way that we aren't doing crazy 10 hours days followed by 3 hour days. Some people prefer to have a set schedule (history M, W, F with science on T, TH, for example), but this worked best for us. When the lessons were easy, we sometimes have history, science, LA, and math all on the same day. Other days, when a particular lesson is heavy with activity, we might only do two subjects. The only other thing not planned this way is art, because we are using Draw & Write Through History; I matched the lessons to the subject matter in MOH. Some weeks we'll do 3 drawing lessons, other weeks only 1. It just depends on how it lines up with MOH. Now, take everything I said and apply it times three... because each of my boys has a schedule independent of his brothers. This may sound super complicated, but it literally took me <30 minutes yesterday to make 1/2 a year of lesson plans for Science, Math, LA, and Bible for all three boys. History is the same for all three (with activity variations), and that took me about an hour the other day (I was also planning each activity, making a supply list, and trying to navigate planning software with which I was unfamiliar, only to abandon it and write everything to a paper planner).
This year our dailies will be math, history (also doing MOH), spelling, free reading, and bible. Science will be 3 days, as will grammar. Writing, handwriting will be twice a week. Art 1-2 days a week. Guitar lesson 1 day a week, but practice 4-6 days a week. He *may* play soccer again this year.
Right now I'm planning to do a block schedule, but I will probably be adjusting this schedule some because I'm finding that we need to do math everyday. On that schedule we don't do any subject everyday, but I will probably split up language arts and math and we will likely do those everyday. We have long school days, but a child sitting at a desk completing work independently is a small part of it. We spend a lot of time in collaborative learning, reading, and activities. My second child is also doing a lot of independent project-based learning.
My dd9 is in 4th grade. Everyday we do math, handwriting, poetry, language arts/grammar. We do our history spine once a week (This Country of Ours and add to our My America binder) but we read historical fictions four days a week to compliment. Science is usually once or twice a week. Fridays we save for spelling, geography, artist and composer study, & Shakespeare.
We do every subject everyday. The curriculum we use would be hard if I did not have them complete even Science and History everyday. Our ASL lessons will be once a week with practice everyday. I make lesson plans with a goal chart for each of my girls and then that way they can see what they need to do and complete it during the day.
We do Math, History, Science, Bible, Reading/LA, Latin everyday. We do art on Mondays and Wedsdays. Music we do Tuesdays and Thursdays. Dd is going into 4th grade this year. Most school days take 5-6 hrs depending on how much dd is dragging it out. We do all of our together work in the morning and then she does her on your own work (worksheets, art projects....)
This is the lesson plan we used last year. I will be tweaking it a bit. Tuesdays we are at a 4-H horse barn feeding as well as training and riding when the weather permits and Thursdays we run errands all day so she does lessons on the go with her piano lessons in the afternoon. Those days will be the same most likely. Our lesson schedule is very uneven so we have heavy days and light days, but it works best for us!
I am worried about fitting everything in! We are starting our semester Monday, so I'll propbably have to tweak my goals, but based on a 34 week school year our schedule will be as follows. I used Excel to make charts. I also left Friday open in case there are things we didn't get done during the week, but I hope to have Friday free for projects, experiments, field trips and/or homeschool group meetings. Basically, doing it this way gave each subject aprox 1 page or 1 lesson per day - 4 days in a week. I followed the simple formula of x amount of lessons (or pages) divided by 34 to give me our weekly goals. Daily Math Handwriting Creative writing Language Spelling/Vocab/Poetry Reading Comp Bible Reading - From book list by grade other subjects SS/Hist - M- read 4 pages, W- read 4 pages, quiz/assesment on Th Map/Geo- Tu, project/hands on activity every other Fri Science- Tu, Th, experiment F Spanish- M, W Latin- Tu PE is done daily through organized sports - they are involved in soccer, swim and martial arts, so each child has at least 1.5 hrs of fitness daily. I haven't bought a specific health course, but we do discuss age appropriate topics often from strangers to nutrition, hygiene to drugs. For Art, I plan to give them different types of fun projects, visit art museums and/or take a few classes. Music is where I struggle, they have done various music lessons, but nothing stuck. I don't think we'll have enough time this year to do something structured. I may just teach them to read music.
Thanks everyone All of your input will be very useful when I sit down to plan. I am leaning towards doing Bible, Math, Language Arts, and silent reading daily. History and Science maybe we'll do three days per week and Art and Spanish two days per week. I wonder if Spanish will need to be done more than twice per week? We'll be using Rosetta Stone. I have no experience in foreign language myself so I'm not sure.
In my opinion, Spanish would need to be done daily if you are trying to get your child fluent. We'll be doing Rosetta Stone a couple times a week, but we will begin speaking to the kids in only Spanish (DH is fluent and I am pretty good) after school hrs. Next year my (then 12 year old) son will be spending between a month to 3 months in a Spanish immersion soccer boarding school in Spain! He is pumped about learning the language so he can get the most of the program. This Oct. he will be in Spain 2 weeks and Italy 2 weeks, with me, so hopefully we'll at least be able to communicate =)
My DH is a native speaker. It was his first language but he rarely uses it now. His speaking skills are weak but he understands most everything. I would like for my DD to be fluent. I am hoping that DH and DD can do this together. Maybe we'll try to fit it in the evenings.
You might just do spanish for fun until she reaches highschool. She may need the foriegn language credit if she plans on going to college. That is what we are doing.
