Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Next School Year

Katie managed to get accepted into the CAD class at the local high school. She can also enroll for some dual enrollment classes at a nearby community college. So, she will be registered at the public school next school year.

Mike and I decided that we will continue to homeschool the rest of our kids next year. Paige and Allie are doing really well with their studies in our homeschool, and I'd like them to have the extra time to explore and be creative instead of wasting time with busy seat-work.

Madelyn would like to attend the public middle school to meet more girls her age. The last few weeks she's been playing with a number of kids in the neighborhood. I'm pretty confident that by the end of the summer, she will have made even more friends in the area.

The two boys don't want to attend the public school. They like being able to complete their work in a timely manner, thus freeing up time for their interests. Robotics tends to take a lot of time and during the build season, it will be better for them to have more freedom with their schedules. They also like to sleep in each morning and don't want to take the bus with Kate at 7:00 am.

I've just started making my curriculum and resource choices. My youngest girls will be fairly easy because we own so many resources. I'll need to pick up Math for each of them, but the rest will be from our personal library. (Doesn't that sound grand?)
The older students will need resource lists more than anything else. They have already begun next year's math. I'd like to do 2 years of math with each of them to give them some wiggle room next year.

Over the next month or two, I'll be working on preparing the daily planner for each child. We tend to have highly successful years when I've planned each day out in advance. The kids also like to do a lot of their work independently and the planner provides them with the guidelines they need to work ahead.

After all the resources are pulled together, I'll be posting what we'll be using next year. What are you doing next year?

1 comment:

Ewe said...

When I went to the Carole Joy Seid seminar, she recommended the parent do a general plan for the year for high school (and I think this would also work for middle school)-basically what you want them to finish each quarter in each subject. Then the STUDENT fills out the lesson plan book each day AFTER they have completed it. For example parent plans they finish 1/2 this science book during first semester. Student records what they did in science each day. It made a lot of sense to me to have a general plan but then record after completing it instead of planning what you will do next week and you may get interrupted or schedule change or spend longer on another subject, etc. If you record it afterwards then you have a record to make a transcript. Plus it makes a lot less work for the parent, the student is the one responsible. This will be good for planning time in college. The parent can check the student's planner weekly and see their progress.
Personally I'm making a list of all the fiction that we own-from board books to picture books to chapter books to adult fiction. I'm over 1000 and I'm not done yet! Our library is so huge that I can't remember if we own it or I used it when I was teaching or if we checked something out of the library. My oldest needs to finish his math from last year and then we need to order math, but I'm not planning on ordering a lot more than math because we have most of what we need in our personal library too.
Have fun planning next year!