One thing I wish I didn't have to do is create a 36 week schedule for everything that doesn't come with a nicely outlined weekly schedule to start. Some curriculum we have is already designed to work with a 36 week schedule and gives helps on how to do it weekly, or is designed that way. With our son's logic text, The Art of Argument, I know so little about such things, so it was difficult to design a schedule out of that, but I did my best. Now that we've done a few lessons I can see it will be easy to figure out a good scheduling method and change it up if we need to. There are schedules online that organize it into semesters, like for a middle school schedule. That just did NOT work for me.
Here is how I organized The Story of the World Vol. 2 for the year.
Last year we did a big "back to school" party. We didn't do that this year. There really is no good excuse. I just wanted to get started and so we did and we planned a fun beginning day, rather than a party the weekend before. :)
We started with a wonderful yummy waffle breakfast made by Grandma at Grandma's place.
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| Coming up from breakfast at Grandma's place |
W had so much energy and excitement. He is like that every first day with all the new books. I wish the enthusiasm lasted throughout the year. ;) He got the girls to follow him and sang a song, "Back to school train, choo choo."
Grandma made some super awesome posters, again, this year. The posters are a word collage of all that they will be learning this year. We displayed them next to their books.
L will be going to a preschool down the street from us. A woman in our neighborhood has a preschool in her basement, she does two classes, one for 3 turning 4 and one for 4 turning 5, and she only takes 10, maybe 12, students a year per class. We've been having a hard time getting L to focus on things and she won't learn to read. I felt like it was a big part because we don't have quite the time to devote to her as we did with the older two. I just had a feeling that this little preschool would help give her the boost she needs, AND keeping her busy and not a distraction to us for two mornings a week. All we need to do is walk her over. Win win. :)
We are going to attempt to teach 20 month old J to use the potty.
We had our science table in the basement last year and it was so dark and really hard to see anything under a microscope. We realized if we moved into the daylight it was an amazing difference. So I moved things around so that we could put our science table by that window in the corner.
Our bookshelf desperately needs some organization and we really should figure out some books to give up or store away. It would be really nice to have the wiggle room.
Also for our first day, we took the kids out to lunch at a place called J Dawgs, they serve JUST hot dogs (all beef and Polish), plus chips and also drinks. I knew all of the kids like hot dogs and they rarely get one, so that was fun. Then we went to See's Candies for a treat.
The first two days of school went quite well. There were a few hiccups from just beginning, but I have great expectations from these kids! We tried something a little different from last year. Instead of doing History and Science all separate we're trying to do them all together first thing after breakfast. Now it HAS been only two days, but I'm really liking it. We will do History the first two days of the week and then Science the next two. History has been easy, but Science will be a challenge for me. It's not as simple since W is learning a more advanced version of Earth and Astronomy than E and L.
I love being in control of my children's education. Hopefully I'm doing it right. It's just like parenting in general, we're kind of figuring it out as we go. :)
