So, last year was my first year of homeschooling and it was Kindergarten, so I may not be an expert here, but I’d thought that I’d share what I’ve done this year.
Last year, I didn’t have much a schedule, we tried a lot of different ways of planning our days. I had some programs that were broken down into lessons and I just did a lesson as often as I thought that subject needed to be taught (ex- Math everyday, Reading everyday, Language Arts 2-3 times a week). We used workboxes toward the end, which I kind of have a love/hate relationship with! I may go into those more thoroughly in the future, depending on whether we implement them back into our schedule this year. My husband was also off of work the entire year, which was wonderful, but sometimes made it hard to stick to a plan. I felt E was already ahead in most areas, so I didn’t feel a lot of pressure to do t
hings ‘right’, also it was only Kindergarten. Of course Kindergarten is very important, but it consists of a lot of information that we deal with in daily life, too, and after all it should be fun!
Shortly after we wrapped up our Kindergarten year, I started to plan out the Grade One year. I had already purchased and recieved all the curriculums that I planned on using for the year (which you can see on my homeschooling section at the top). I first decided how many terms that I would have. I based this on our main curriculum, which this year is Christian Light Education or CLE. We are using this for E’s Reading, Science, Social Studies and Math. Each subject has 5 LightUnits in it. So naturally, I decided to have 5 terms. I figured out approximately how many days the students in our area where in public school and divided that by 5. So that gave me approximately the length of each term, which ended up being about 8 weeks.
I also knew that I wanted to have a long break after our baby is born. So, I planned to have one term finished by the time I would be 38 weeks pregnant. That meant that we needed to start our year in August. I planned a 7 week break, here, but most of the year will be 8 weeks on and 2 weeks off. We also have alot of free days that we will use whenever something comes up.
For the actual schedule, I took the amount of lessons from our CLE curriculum and divided that out evenly into our term. Example- if there were 32 Reading lessons and we have 40 days in a term, that would be 4 days a week of Reading lessons. For other subjects such as Language Arts, Spelling and Handwriting I just decided how often I felt those should be done and added them accordingly. I have tried to find worksheets and/or unit studies that the boys can do together that correspond to the lessons in E’s curriculum. Example- in E’s Science lessons, he is learning about seeing and feeling and there is a lot of mention of shapes, so the boys will work on different activities involving shapes at the same time. I have also added in some other unit studies, which are awesome for them to do together even though they are at different levels.
That’s basically, how I’ve put the schedule together for this year. I am planning one term at a time, but because each term is the same length and same curriculum they will be similiar and therefore easier to plan!
Next week I hope to go into a typical day of our homeschool.
Amberley
