More On Planning For The Year

This is typically what I do to think through how the school year will go. I like to plan science to fit with the seasons. It is fun to do outdoor type activities in the spring. Most of the time I do all of these subjects all year long. I don't do each subject everyday of the week though. This method has been helpful for me when I need to plan the schedule for the week & day. A few weeks after I started teaching, I'd usually end up adapting it a bit as I saw how we were making it through each day.

When I was teaching my kiddos who had numerous problems, I'd usually start the school year out with one to three subjects (depending on what those were). I commonly started with a subject that would definitely take all year to finish. Sometimes I added in a few things that were just struggle areas for my kids. One thing we did for awhile was to go over idioms. We were able to have fun with what seemed silly but had a hidden value. I found that adding 1-2 subjects a week quite often made our year start to go more smoothly.

I did continue to teach my kids with difficulties throughout the summer. The focus changed from getting information in to enjoying what we had learned. We were able to put into active practice what we had been learning. Such things as continuing to measure/graph our findings, to measuring/graphing the vegetable growth in our garden. The kids discovered many things as we were out in the garden. We had talked about pollination and when we were out in the garden my five year old son saw bees polinating and got all excited. This was pure joy for me to watch.