Random Thoughts on School Planning

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ome of these thoughts actually came across on my Twitter account, if you follow it, but I started making notes so that I would remember what I was thinking, and then I thought I’d share this with you. I do this because I adore planning posts from other mothers. They help me think through what I’m doing and improve it. I get ideas. I get inspired. And so I share in hopes that you benefit in the same way that I do.

• If you can get a hardback {or, even better, library binding} for within $3 of the paperback cost, do it! I find that paperbacks tend to be so badly bound that they do not stand up to re-reading. My children are careful with books, but some paperbacks fall apart anyhow. I am so happy that I started buying hardbacks whenever it was financially feasible. If you end up buying a paperback twice, you don’t save a dime!
• I’m thinking about combining students for various subjects.
  • First of all, we didn’t finish the Burgess Bird Book last year, so I’m thinking about throwing it into Circle Time. They love it when I match the chapters with realistic coloring pages accompanied by our birding field guide.
  • I already combine all of the children for Shakespeare.
  • I plan to combine O-Age-Three and Q-Age-Five for a “Year 0” time. We’ll read through Winnie the Pooh and then Beatrix Potter’s tales.
  • Q-Age-Five claims that she is “ready for school.” I’ve really been holding her back for awhile now, but I have decided that doing this any longer would be a disservice to her. So I think I’ll combine the girls for geography in Term 1 and see how it goes. We’ll be doing Tree in the Trail. I don’t think it’d be wise to start her in Year 1 yet, for various reasons, but I think that doing some geography and then starting her in a slow, 18-month Year 1 in Term 2 {when she is six} might work well for her. Adding in a couple small things should give her mind some things to think about, which is what I think she is craving, while not overdoing book work at this age.
• This year, we’re starting a Book of Centuries. I purchased the download from Simply Charlotte Mason. I priced printing it, and it seems to come in at around $10 per copy. I’ll be printing five copies at once {one for me, four for the children} and saving them until each student is ready for them. I like being able to reprint if a student wants to begin again when he is older. I have always wanted my own BOC, but I would never have paid the big bucks for it. Ten dollars, though, seems well worth it to me.
• I went ahead and purchased the Classical Composition teacher’s guide. I was trying not to buy anything for this venture, but I decided I needed something to look at and read. My goal is still to modify E-Age-Ten’s written narration assignments rather than doing straight Classical Composition, but I decided I am just too ignorant to wing it entirely on my own. In an ideal world, I’d also do many of the exercises myself in order to improve my own writing.
• I now have Island Story in an audio book. I cannot decide whether or not I want to use it, or whether I want to continue reading it aloud on my own. I haven’t used audio books before {except while traveling in the car} and I can’t decide if beginning to use them would actually save me time, or just complicate things because it adds a new factor.
• I think I’m going to substitute the biography of Faraday from the free reading list for the biography of Alexander Graham Bell that is assigned for Term 2 of Year 5. The reason for this is that we have long owned a decent biography of Bell, and I think that E-Age-Ten already thinks he “knows” Bell. Faraday, on the other hand, would be a new person to him. I think he’d find it more interesting this way.
• Year Five just looks huge to me. There is so. much. reading. Good thing E-Age-Ten is pretty quick at such things! He’s going to have to do a lot more on his own this year, due to the neediness of his sisters. As long as I carve out time to coach him in his writing, I think he’ll be okay with that. I often thought of Circle Time as helping me keep in touch with my preschoolers, but I think this year it’ll help me keep in touch with my big student as well!