More on Planning

Sherri asked me to share a little bit more about my planning, so here it is! Let me first say, I'm no kind of expert here. But if this will give you some ideas, then I'm happy to share what I'm doing.

We've been playing at "doing school" for a couple years. Basically, we've done preschool at home. I started out planning a week at a time right on my blog. After a while I had a general idea of what I wanted to do, but I didn't really write up a plan. Instead, I started participating in the Weekly Wrap-up to keep myself on task. Preschool really isn't very difficult, and this wasn't very hard, but it was effective at keeping things on the top of my mind.

Now, we're more or less doing Kindergarten (though the label means a lot less at home), and I'm feeling the need to plan a bit more. Over the past while we've been adding bits here and there, and I started needing some kind of checklist to make sure that I was getting everything accomplished. I've been using a marker board. The colorful words are actually permanent marker, which washes off easily with the white board cleaner. I use a regular dry erase marker for check marks. The marker board also tends to be where I keep a to-do list if I've got one.



I really like a lot of things about the marker board. I've been considering keeping it for some aspects of our day, notably scripture study, but also piano lessons and read-alouds. Basically for things that will continue even in "off" weeks.



But with adding our new content that we're doing, I began to feel like I need something more than just the marker board, so I made up this spreadsheet. It was inspired by this and this, which I ran across on the Hive Mind message boards, though I can't remember who posted them. I wanted to create a checklist sort of format for myself. Mine is nothing fancy; just a list on the left of all the subjects we'll be covering by about September. There are two columns, one week in each. That's where I write in my plans. Most of the subjects can be planned out in advance, so I did 6 weeks. Some things, such as phonics and piano lessons (when they start) are mastery-based, so it'll be more a journal of what we did, rather than a plan for those areas. I just made a note of what we're doing the book & page number for reference so that I can find my place quickly and easily. If you click the picture you can enlarge to see exactly what we're doing this week.

This is a brand new thing for us, so I can't tell you how well it's going to work. I'm not naturally good at time management, so for me that's going to be the great challenge. I'll need to actually look at my plans. Fortunately, this sort of thing is a skill that can be developed, and kindergarten is not compulsory, so we still have time for me to practice.