My School Schedule

I posted this to my homeschool group and one of my blogger friends suggested I post it here....it is long, so be forwarned. Feel free to ask me about any of the curriculum I am using....that is how I learned about what I have used....by asking people and looking things over and trying various things until finding things that worked for us.

I have had a few people ask me about my schedule for this year and I needed to write it up for another reason, so I thought I would post it here. If anyone wants to come over and see what I have done, feel free to ask! Or, if you want me to email a copy of my spreadsheets so you could figure out what I am talking about, let me know. I spent a lot of time over the summer trying out various things to get organized for the upcoming year. I have a ninth grader and a seventh grader, along with a 15 month old and another due in December. With the start of high school and also knowing I would potentially have less time due to the little ones, I wanted a system that worked for everyone that would be easy to implement. We have now used it for two weeks, and I have to say I am very pleased with myself! Sometimes I plan things that look great on paper and just don't pan out in reality. This time my work paid off and we all like how this system works. I realize that what works for my family will not necessarily work for everyone's family, but here it goes. Feel free to use and adapt whatever you can. I know I got a lot of ideas from other people that I have changed and manipulated so that it fit our household. This is by far the most scheduled/organized I have ever been!

I have set up two binders for each of my kids. The first of the binders is a 3” binder and this is for their cumulative work. I am not expecting the whole year to fit in here, but perhaps half a year. I will just have to see how crowded it gets before I begin another large binder. The second binder is for their weekly work. They each have 8 tabs, which are identical. Here are the labels for the tabs: Weekly Schedule, Sonlight 100 Schedule, History, Literature, Spelling, IEW, Science, and French, which I will detail in the following paragraphs.

Weekly Schedule: I have created an Excel Worksheet that has four workbooks (or whatever they are called), two for each child. The first workbook is the yearly schedule. The columns I have are Date, Sonlight, Apologia, CBS, Piano, Rosetta, Math, Starting Points, IEW, To Go/Other. I have then filled in the dates for Monday-Friday from when I started school until end of June 2010. Then, under Sonlight and Apologia, I listed the numbers 1-180, which corresponds with the Sonlight schedule number at the top of each day (the small number). We are fairly flexible homeschoolers that enjoy taking field trips and vacations and what not, and I am just not that concerned about when exactly our school breaks are, so I just have it going all the way through, which means we currently end our Core 100 and Apologia April 2. Well, that is assuming we would work straight through with absolutely no breaks, which I can tell you is unrealistic at best! But what I plan to do is when we take a day off, or weeks off like at Christmas/New Years, at that point I will just cut and paste the remaining days downward. For CBS (Community Bible Study), I have the day and the week of the work they are supposed to do that day. For Piano I either have the minutes they are supposed to practice or if it is a lesson day. For math we do ALEKS on the computer, and they are supposed to complete three sections and work a minimum of 20 minutes....this might be modified as the year goes by. For Starting Points I put the pages I want them to complete on specific days, along with listing the dates we meet for discussion. For IEW (Institute for Excellence in Writing) I will list what I expect them to have done that day or done by a certain day, along with marking the days we meet as a class. In the To Go/Other column this is where I put their outside activities, such as PE, going to a friend's house, etc. The second workbook is the weekly schedule. I have this formatted so that I can copy and paste the information from the yearly schedule into the weekly schedule, along with other items such as chores, more detailed To Go list, Special Instructions, etc.

Sonlight 100: I copied the IG and place that week's schedule behind this tab, so they can easily see what they are supposed to be doing.

History: I have copied the questions for the various history books they are reading that week and have starred certain questions to answer in written format. They know they are supposed to read the notes also. For the mapwork what I did was include the “answer key” maps and I also put the number that corresponded to the correct answer above the name of the place. So, instead of them having to try to figure out where a certain place was on a map, what they need to do is go to the particular map, knowing that a certain place was #3, and then they were to label it. I have always had good intentions about doing mapwork with the kids and ended up never doing it, so this was a great compromise for our family and it looks like it will actually get done!

Literature: I have copied the questions for the literature book(s) that they are reading for the week. They are to pick two questions for each day to answer, and I don't care which two questions they pick.

Spelling: We are doing the Alternate Spelling. On Monday we do the pre-test, on Tuesday and Wednesday they write their misspelled words 5 times, on Thursday use misspelled words in sentences, and on Friday they have a post test. Any words they get wrong on the post test are added to the words for the next week.

IEW: This is where they keep their writing that they are working on.

Science: We are doing Apologia Biology this year and while this is our third year of doing Apologia, this is our first year that we purchased the lapbook/notebook from Knowledge Box Press....and I have to say I am thrilled with it so far. We follow the Sonlight schedule, so I have that behind the science tab along with any of the pages from the KB Press file, such as On Your Own questions, experiments, etc. I have also typed out the vocabulary words with blank lines next to them that the kids can choose to fill in or not. Last year they had to do the vocabulary, but this year I am making it optional unless their test scores start to be affected.

French: We are doing Rosetta Stone French, version 3. We have used Rosetta Stone German version 2 before and I have to say version 3 is far superior. I printed out their schedule that the suggest along with the worksheets that they are to do for that week.

My kids are liking having everything in one binder and what we do is sometime on the weekend we go through the various answers. An added benefit of having them pick their own questions in literature is that they typically don't choose the same questions, so they actually are exposed to four questions for each day's reading. Once we are finished going through their work, I then transfer the old work and schedules to their large binder and put the new information in. This allows me to actually look over what they have done and I am able to double check for completeness. This does not take very long at all and it keeps the kids and myself accountable.

If you made it all the way to the end of this long description, congratulations! If you have any questions, please ask. It is hard to describe some of the components, and I am sure that I have left some vital things out.