Time to Start Planning!

So as we start getting to the end of July, the Crazy Little Kids and I start getting antsy. We're starting to feel ready to gear up for the new school year! We're not quite ready to start our "official" school year, but almost. So in the next few weeks, I begin to start setting up an overview of the school year and giving the kids some clues about what's coming up. It helps build the excitement!

When we first started homeschooling, I had dreams of making up all my own activities and finding all these amazing books to read, all on my own. Yeah, that lasted about four months! I had a 6 year old to teach and a crazy 2 year old girl who was into everything. Making up my own stuff just was not an option! Fortunately, I found this series of books that have been an absolute joy for us! We love love love the  Learn at Home series! It really suits the crazy kids' learning styles, and it also suits my teaching style. A lovely fit for us! Thirty-six weeks of topics to study, possible field trips, activities and crafts for math, spelling, reading, science, social studies and language arts. It's all crammed into one lovely book for each grade!

Love love love these books!

There are only two issues I have with these books. First, they're not published any more, so the only way I can find them is on Ebay or discount book sellers. And sometimes, this means it's missing pages, which is a problem. Bleurgh! The other issue is there isn't an index of topics or books being read! So every summer, I've had to go through it week by week with CLB to see what he thinks he will enjoy and what he isn't so thrilled about and then tweak it all. For him, we usually focus on the books he'll be reading (the series suggests a book to read every week), so that I can start reserving books at the library. And if a book doesn't seem engaging to CLB or for some reason our library doesn't have it, I start looking for books to switch things up. It doesn't happen often, but for those few times it does, I want to be prepared for it. So then I end up writing up something that looks like this:

Am I seriously supposed to read this chicken scratch!?!?

I don't know what my problem is that I can't type my book list out. It always needs to be written by hand! Everything else, I can type and go, but for some reason, this gem needs to have the chicken scratch to make sense. And after I'm done with it, I want nothing to do with typing it out, so heaven help me if I lose this thing! It's our overview for the entire year, with dates and weeks and books and topics all written out.

What's tough this year is that CLG is getting added into the mix. And her list is crazy! Lots and lots of books for every week, and I STILL can't type it out while I go through it!

Well, at least it's a little neater!

So whereas one sheet of paper will hold all of CLB's yearly outline, one sheet of paper will only take care of 5 days!!! for CLG!! Seriously, I have to do this on the computer, right!?!? I'll be here forever doing this. I don't think I did this with CLB...I was too much of a newbie homeschooler to think of it.

I will say, though, that it is exciting to get a closer look at what we'll be exploring this year and all the new books and activities we have to look forward to. Once these lists are done, I'll have a good vision of how the school year will proceed. And once the school year starts, I'll spend time each week planning out the following week, but we haven't gotten that far yet. We are all starting to anticipate getting back into the swing of things, though! And if we can't wait any longer, well, we can always just start! That's what's fun about homeschooling!