(Disclaimer: These pictures are horrible, taken with my phone because I have my camera in my hospital bag in the car. Ha!)
We had a pretty good first day of school. All in all it went well. I did have an appointment in the morning so the husband started the day off with History and then started Language, until I got home. W was good about doing his work and he got to have a little break between. We went to the library at the end of the day to pick up some books for W to read.
This is how I have it organized this year. It is MUCH more simple than last year. We are still using The Well-Trained Mind as a guide. So far I haven't figured out how to incorporate time4learning.com, but maybe it will need to come up later.
I decided to use one of these teacher's planner books. In this state, we don't need to technically keep any record of grades until 9th grade, I believe. But I thought it would be nice to get into the habit. This book is clearly for an entire classroom, but I LOVE the planning section of it. It makes it so easy for us to plan our weeks out quite clearly.
The grade and assignment recording section will look very blank with just W on it and all the rest of the rows empty. But if I keep using this idea, then I will at least have our other children on there in the future.
I organized our shelves a lot differently, instead of a bin for each subject (which left for a lot of empty space in each bin), I will be having a bin for each child. Some of the other bins are being used for old or future textbooks or reference books, and art supplies.
Here is W's notebook:
I knew W would still want to check things off as he goes, so I found this sheet at
http://thatresourcesite.com/, and had my wonderful mother print and laminate it for me. I like how it is in cursive and that W can read it even though I've never taught him cursive.
His notebook has dividers that start with his weekly assignments with a separate pocket divider for each subject. I will be copying and/or putting pages in each pocket divider behind "weekly assignments" that he is to do during the week.
When he is done with his assignments, he puts them in this divider pocket, in the back of the binder, titled, "Completed assignments". After I've looked at them I will mark them completed and put them in the back of the binder behind the divider. I still don't know what I am going to do when the binder gets really full. I am considering for certain subjects to get a separate binder for completed assignments to keep until the year is done.
So much simpler and easier than before. W seems excited about it; being able to have all of his work in one place, and I think he feels accomplished when he puts things in the completed pocket. :)
I will update in a month or so at the latest to let you know how it's working out. Tomorrow W has Chinese lessons and we will be doing school too, so it should be interesting.
