Preparing For A New Year

When I homeschooled, I sat down with all the curriculum I planned to use. The first step I did was to look at how many lessons were in each subject. I personally chose to do all subjects all year long. I know that some school teachers will rotate some subjects. For example, Social Studies/History and Science don't usually have enough lessons for the whole school year.

Because I did all subjects throughout the year, I did those types of subjects 1-3 days a week. It was pretty easy to figure out how to divide them out when I looked at how many days were in the school year. Our state required a certain number of  homeschooling days. The amount of time each day varied on the child.

One of the benefits that I loved was that I could count time doing chores (Home Ec), taking them to gymnastics/swimming lessons (PE), piano lessons (music) etc. You get the point. Some of my kids were in public school part time and I tried to coordinate what subjects they were being taught there and what I needed to cover at home. I really did find this to be more difficult than total homcschool.

Anyway, I got a bit off topic. Once I knew how many days a week each subject would be, I started setting up a schedule. It took a bit of time to learn how long we needed in each subject. Some of the lesson plans told me how long to plan for the subject to be taught. About a month into the year, I took  time to think about how our schedule was working.

I also started talking about our school year with the kids a bit. I wanted them to have something to look forward to. I learned with some of my children that I needed to adapt some of the subjects I taught. I tried to do more hands on and I enjoyed taking them on field trips. As I looked through the various subjects, I tried to think of field trips or things that would make learning more fun.

Another thing that I attemped to do was to be part of a homeschool group. This gave me a chance to learn from other mothers and my children a place to be around other children. Our kids also attended a mid-week church activity.