Ramblings...

Well ladies and gentlemen our new school year is just around the corner! We are all very excited over here about it. We take the year-round approach because it fits our family best. It allows for breaks to be planned around The Spouse’s schedule and doesn’t produce large gaps in our schooling. I’ve found these large gaps make returning to our regular schedule very difficult. Our longest break is a month; which is when we plan family vacations. Since we school year-round with our start date in the summer, our family vacations can take place during the off-season, which saves us money and keeps us from encountering massive crowds.

In order to help us transition into our new school year this year I decided to start having homeschool powwow right before the start of each new school year. It will give us a chance to go over what materials we will be using, our goals for that school year, and to discuss any changes that have been made either organizational or schedule wise. This should help with the frequent questions I have been encountering from T.B.M. ranging from “Will I be in Kindergarten this year?” to “Am I going to be doing division?!”

On tap for this year’s powwow will be a run through of our 2011-2012 Curriculum for General Disarray and Professor Chaos; as well as a run through of our school schedule for this upcoming year, and our planned breaks. I’m looking forward to sitting down with them and allowing them to finally flip through the various textbooks and materials I’ve been gathering over the past six months. Hopefully it will further stoke the flames of excitement they have burning for our 2011-2012 school year!

So how do you transition into a new school year?

Prince may party like it’s 1999 but we are knee deep in planning like it’s our 2011-2012 school year! I’m very excited for this upcoming school year. We are really starting to find our homeschooling groove and what works for us as a family, and as individuals. My biggest hurdle this year, and the previous year as well, was finding a simple way to plan out our year. I’ve tried online planning methods before through Homeschool Tracker Basic. While it works for many out there it just didn’t do it for me. While I’m all for techy stuff and online goodness, it became too much of a hassle to go in and update. As well as plugging in all of our curriculum materials and our goals.


I then tried making my own lesson plan book using Donna Young printable planning pages, but the binder turned into a headache when I needed to take it with me on the go, plus having to frequently print off pages made it seem like a total waste, and just unpractical for a family with limited space, which is something we have to deal with.


Then I thought about the agenda books we had when I was in middle school. These were geared more for documenting homework assignments and paperwork that needed to be signed off, but I really liked the idea of each child having their own individual planner. So I spent a good month hunting around the net for something that would meet this need. First I tired going through sites that actually sale agenda books for schools. Sites with books I liked all had minimum purchase requirements, so as a homeschooler with only two students instead of a class of 45 I couldn’t purchase the books. Unless, I wanted to blow an obscene amount of money on something I may not even like at the end of the school year.


After knocking those off my list I hit amazon in search of agenda books/student planners that would allow for smaller purchases. I found a few but, most where religious themed with bible verses on either every page or in every daily block, way too much for our secular family. I could see ignoring a few verses every now and then, but this was overkill. The secular ones I found didn’t fit our schooling schedule since we homeschool year round (July-June), and they were geared towards the traditional schooling schedule.


I finally decided to search for a homeschool student planner just to see what it would bring up, and low and behold there is a student planner for homeschoolers called The Homeschool Student Planner. I wasn’t all gung-ho about getting it at first. I’m big on seeing what I’m going to buy, there are actually items I won’t purchase because, the website doesn’t have enough detail for my taste. So I did some searching for reviews on the product and while none actually showed off any pictures I decided to take a leap based on what I had been able to find. Factor in the money back guarantee and I felt confident in making the purchase.


I bought two planners so each child can have one, which came to $40, but considering the cost of printer ink and paper I think I’m coming out ahead compared to our previous method. I’m not having the boys fill these out themselves yet, I’m not sure when *or if* I will turn over the planning to them altogether. For now though I’m using it to plan out our school year, so we have what they each are doing in a place they can both easily access. It also helps keep both their work separate so I can be in the zone planning and working through the work for one child, then close up and move on to the next child.


The planners easily fit into T.B.M.’s book bags as well, allowing for us to school on the go, which will be very handy when we head to the states for a nearly two month visit in a couple of years. Allowing them both to do their work while we are either in a plane or a car, ensuring we meet our schooling goals while getting in plenty of time with family and friends, while limiting the amount of stuff we have to lug around the planet.


The planner breaks the year down by quarters which I really like since I set our goals by quarters (seasons), so this flows right into what we are already doing. I can also write in the dates, and while I did that this year I don’t foresee me doing it next year. I realized after filling in the dates and nearly the first quarter lessons when it hit me that I have to work in the breaks as well. So for this year I’m going to finish out the planning, and then when we take our breaks I’ll push back the work for that time period and pick it up when we resume.


Next year though I’m going to fill in the day of school on the left hand margin (first, second….etc. day of school) and then fill in the week of school when we get to it along the top. This will allow us to take our breaks as needed and then pick back up without any erasing in the planner on my end. :) The only negative with the planner so far is that the quarters are a typical nine weeks long, and our quarters are 13 weeks, but each planner comes with extra pages that I can make copies of to use so I can print out enough to cover the whole school year. I’ll just staple them together and paperclip the bundle to the quarter they belong with. This will still allow me to have all the items right there at hand, instead of pulling planning papers out of every nook and cranny in our home.


Each quarter also has an envelope to store paperwork, I’m not sure if we will use this feature this school year, but I can see using it when we have to do some carschooling, because it will allow everything to stay safely put away. I’m hoping this planning method pans out better than the previous ones; I have a good feeling about it since I don’t dread doing the planning, unlike when I was planning before. Here’s hoping!


So what are you using for your planning purposes?

Well we are in our second day of our week long break. I figured after 51 days of schooling it was time for some down time. We had originally planned for a much longer break to coincide with a family vacation, but due to some work stuff on The Spouse’s end we had to toss our plans in the trash. Such is life…or at least that is what I plan to tell myself. So instead of the pre-planned three week break that was suppose to run for most of October, we are just taking off this last week of September and starting October bright-eyed and bushy tailed.

I’m going to use this time to make some final changes to our schedule and the way we do things. We are committed to year round schooling *it makes the most sense to us and gives us the most flexibility*, so now I have to figure out exactly how breaks will work. I think I have a good idea down, and I’ll have more on it once I‘ve put on the final touches. I’ve also been looking at how we do science, and have come up with a plan that I think will serve us well in that area as well. Now it is just a matter of putting all the various elements I have been tweaking together to make one solid customized homeschool plan for our family.

With that, planning each year after this one should flow rather easily, since I will know what subjects we are covering and what materials I need to gather. We’ll have an idea as to when we need to plan family vacations, *at least on our end…plans are always subjective to change*. This is where our flexibility will come in, I can plan for x-amount of days in a certain month, but if things change then we will just pick up our lesson plans and keep going until we can take our extended break for family vacation.

I’ll have much more on our lesson/schedule plans/changes/tweaks later on in the week…or possibly weekend.