Moms that use a curriculum

[nrsenadenos]

How do you lesson plan/organize your day? The thread about how you start your day got me thinking about it.

We are using the CLASS program, so we have to turn in a certain amount of completed work. Technically we have 12 months to do a grade level, but I like to get it done before that. So what I've done was set a goal "end by" date, count out how many weeks we have, set aside a few weeks for "break" (like we won't do school work the week of Christmas and we took about a month off with moving and the new baby), etc. Then I divide out the work we have by the number of weeks we have to do it in. For example, if there are 21 weeks in our school year and there are 42 science lessons, then I know we have to do 2 science lessons per week to stay on track.

However, we don't do the same thing every day necessarily. So if we have to do 5 reading lessons for one week and we are on a roll we might do 2 or 3 in one day and then none the next. If I know we have a doctor's appointment we might take something with us that is more workbook intense like math to work on in the waiting room and then play catchup with our science experiments the next day. I post our goals for the week on the fridge and we check things off as they get done. About once a month I will go back and refigure where we are at and see if we need to add in any extra work or cut back on anything to try and keep it all balanced until the end of the year (some weeks we might work ahead and others we might have something come up and not get everything done that we had planned).

So if you are doing "school at home" where you have to turn in work, how do you organize your day/week so that everything gets done on time?

[By Grace]

We use Sonlight, so everything from our Core is mapped out for me. Some things, like math and grammar, I add to the schedule at the beginning of the year so I can make sure we keep a steady pace on those. But other things, like science and some supplements, we just do them as we have time. I have long-term goals for when I want to be at a certain place with those, but it's not set in stone or anything. And even our scheduled work is more of a suggestion than a law. I try to complete the week's work by the end of the week, but we have more productive days and less productive days.

[homeschoolingmama]

We have done school with a curriculum that does most all of it (Sonlight), to putting together different curriculum ourselves, to me writing the plans for what we're doing and not using curriculum at all. Either way, I like to use the forms found on this website to plan our days. Even if your curriculum lays out the work really well, I find that just getting everything done with each child can be tough if I don't plan it out....

the shedule form that we use from that website has checkboxes at the top for which day it's for. We do the same thing most days (I use a time slot for history/science. We do history Mon/Tue and science Wed/Thu but I write history/science on the form and it works since I use the same time slot, kwim?). Friday's are totally different and I don't use the same schedule for them at all!

[alanajo]

I use http://www.superteacherworksheets.co...sonplanner.pdf to plan out my day. We do have a schedule made out but we rarely go exactly by that. We just do the work in whatever order we choose. Some days we do everything + more and other days we don't do it all. I just take a highlighter and draw a line through what we have finished on that day. My main goal is to get everything done by the end of the week.