Plan What I Want Us To Cover
I start off planning our year by figuring out what types of things we would like to learn. I sit down with both of my children and see what they are interested in and then I figure out what types of things I would like them to learn. I then use that information to buy whatever curriculum that we need and to plan any activities I would like to incorporate. Then I write everything out on a paper and try to figure out how long things will take us to complete, what things will last all year, and if we have enough planned for the whole year.
What I Add To My Planner
I don’t add all of our subjects to my homeschool planner at the beginning of the year, only our language arts and math gets added because we use a solid curriculum for those subjects. I add all of the lessons to my planner, along with any extra math and language arts activities I would like to use. When we complete something on our loop schedule I will insert that into my planner to keep track of what we have completed.
What’s In Our Loop Schedule
Loop scheduling has saved our homeschool by saving my sanity. We use a loop schedule for our social and science because I feel like these are the things that we are not getting to every day. A loop schedule allows us to complete a task and know exactly where we left off when we have the time to work on these subjects again. For example, sometimes we have a couple of hours a day and we can complete more than one task on our day but sometimes we have no time and we aren’t able to complete anything. The loop allows us to see that we are still accomplishing our goals even if we aren’t getting to the subjects every single day.
Planning Our Field Trips
Planning field trips is an ongoing task because event and classes are continually being added throughout the year. What I do try to do at the beginning of the year though is try to figure out what places we could visit or classes could join that might line up with what we are already learning about. An example being, this year we are learning about animals around the world in science which mean I have planned trips to the zoo, to see IMAX movies that have to do with animals and make trips to the science center to check out their new exhibit of Inside Animals.
