Yearly Planning for Next Year

I understand that not everyone loves to plan and organize as much as I do, so you will have to bear with me in my extreme "geeky-ness!" I get great joy out of planning and I find our school runs so much more smoothly when I have a plan!

The first thing that I did was to look at next year's calendar and mark out the weeks we would be gone and figure out how I wanted to break up the 36 weeks. I chose 36 weeks because TOG has 36 lessons and even though we technically school year-round, I do try to have a difference between the normal year and our summer work.

The next thing that I have done is to break all my curriculum up into 36 weeks. This I have listed on the chart below. This is the first year that I have done this with all the subjects, and so I know that there will be weeks that we don't get through everything, but I really like to keep moving on our TOG studies so that we can get through the whole curriculum by the time we go on vacation in June. It has worked this year, and knowing that I can't stop has been a great motivator to keep me pushing forward. I have been pleased with how much we did get done. We'll see how it goes with everything pre-scheduled! Whatever we can't finish will be finished in our summer weeks.

The final thing that I am working on is making up my notebooks. Last year I had wonderful sucess with my history notebooks that I am going to make monthly notebooks with the kids daily work. I have been tearing up workbooks and copying pages that we will need, but I think it will be so nice to have everything in one place next year.

The final step is to make my checklist. I don't like working from a strict schedule (meaning from 9-9:30 we do math, etc.) I much prefer having a list where I can make sure we completed everything I wanted to get done that week. I use this page (which I "stole" and modified from Jessica. On this page I write down everything I need to remember to accomplish.

Pictures of the Notebook

1. Reading chart from TOG. I didn't scan anything that is copyrited so I don't show that page here.

2. Student page printed from The Loom.

3. History/Bible questions from the student pages that I copied onto a word document so that the kids could have room to write their answers. This has been so nice, because I can't tell you how many different notebooks my kids wrote their answers in before and I never could find them to look them over.

4. Notebooking pages. I pulled these together myself from various sources. I am using some of the material from the TOG lapbooks. I am also using the beautiful free notebooking pages that Debra in MO posted on the Yahoo Loose Threads group. I selected dictation selections from Julie's Ancient Copywork book available at Lulu.com and a few other sources. Here are the three pages we did this week. The first two pages have books that can opened. The third is the diagram of the temple.

5. Maps from Mapaids

6. Writing-I included a page for them to do a prewrite for whatever IEW unit we are working on. This week we are reviewing key word outlines and dress-ups.

Next I included blank paper for them to write a rough draft (and a IEW checklist)

I included a blank piece of paper where we will tape the final typed paper.

7. I have another blank page to put pictures of whatever project we do this week.

8. I put the quiz from the Evaluations CD as the final page.

The kids did so great with it this week. It kept me focused, organized and on track!! I know they will love the finished product.