So this is our last official week of Summer vacation and we will be starting our homeschool 2011-2012 year on Monday! To sum up last year, we got off to a slow start and spent much of the year planning and schooling on the fly. Well this summer I have spent just about every extra minute planning for this year so we will be off to a better start!
THE CALENDAR YEAR
Today I will share how I went about planning the upcoming year. I started with just planning the school year calendar. This year we were "finished" in early May, which was nice, but I started thinking, what is the use of planning our school year to coincide with everyone else's? One of the great benefits of homeschooling is having the flexibility to take off the times other people aren't and to get the deals on travel and the better weather. So we sat down and discussed when we would like to have our breaks and started the calendar from there. We decided on February, May and November. Ideally I would prefer September to be off, but we can work on it for next year and this year we will be hosting a large Thanksgiving, so I figured it would be nice to have some time off before that! So with 52 weeks in the year and 36 weeks of school, I came up with a trimester schedule starting August 1, 2011 and ending June 30, 2012.
Once that was complete, I started plugging dates and units and chapters into an excel spreadsheet to account for all of the lessons we wanted to cover this year. It looks a little daunting, but I am a long range planner so I like to see how it will all come out in the big picture. (This spring, I worked on a 15 year long range plan to see how all the subjects will eventually fit together in one cohesive picture.) I still need to fit Magnolia's plans into the picture, but her work is a much smaller task!
UP NEXT: OUR WEEK AT A GLANCE
So proud of you Megan, looks like you've worked hard. Good luck next week and have fun!
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