While most of my planning for next year has been done, there are still a few things remaining. One of those has been a daily schedule. Schedules have been the bane of my homeschool existence. My princesses just don't function well with schedules. But I remain convinced that if we can stick to one, the rest of life will flow a lot better. So I have spent much time over the last week thinking about how to make things work for us. I will be adding Princess M in to our homeschool next year as a preschooler. Princess L will be a first grader. But she will still require me to work with her for almost the entire time. Princess S will be a fifth grader. I need to begin to mover her toward the dialectic level. However, I'm not sure yet how to get her there. Princess E will be a seventh grader. She will be a second year dialectic student, but last year was very difficult as she fought the work load tooth and nail. Despite the training I did to help her, she is my strong willed child who has to do everything her way - even if she can see without a shadow of doubt that her way will take longer, be more difficult and result in inaccurate results. So, I still have much work to do with her. Needless to say, it is going to require a strict schedule in order for everyone to get the piece of my time that they will need.
I decided that Princess S needs a very strict schedule. I filled in for her when she is to do each subject. I haven't done that before. There were certain times for group work, but I generally let her decide what order to do her assignments in. She can make school last a lifetime, with both ADD and SPD playing their parts to keep her distracted as well as being a distraction. I decided to give her a finite amount of time for each subject, and to list in what order she will do each subject. I'm going to set my alarm on my wrist watch to make sure that all transitions happen as scheduled. My prayer is that by mid-year, she would be beginning to finish subjects early and either use the time as quiet free time (reading a book or drawing) or else working ahead. Any assignments for the day that are not finished will be considered "homework" and she will have to complete them before being allowed free time. For Princess E, I took all her blocks of time that she wasn't doing something with the rest of us and called them "independent work" times. She will continue to schedule out her week as she did last year, and will be able to decide what order to do things in each day. However, I told her that I reserved the right to make changes to her schedule if it is causing problems. One problem she had last year is that she scheduled her reading assignments very light the first day, and then didn't do her outlines the way she was instructed, and therefore would have to re-read everything the day she tried to do her AQ/TQ's. She would get behind and not have them done, and everything would get pushed back. This year I told her that she will be assigning all of her TOG reading assignments the first two days and will be doing KWO's a la IEW with her History Core and History In-Depth reading. She will be working each day until 3:15pm, and if she finished what she had assigned for herself early, she is to work ahead on the next day's work. If she didn't finish all the work assigned for the day by then, she too will have "homework".
Another thing I did was to schedule in two 15 minute quick clean sessions - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The morning one will hopefully allow them to catch up on any morning chores that weren't completed or do some other cleaning that they can potentially earn commission for. The morning cleaning will be followed by a 15 minute snack time. The afternoon snack will be at 3:15 with a fifteen minute cleaning following it.
For Princess L, I have assigned her a play time with Princess M, as well as a time for her to read to Princess M. She will have some scheduled free times. I have decided to break up her time with me into three half hour slots. We will spend 45 minutes on language arts, 30 minutes on math, and 15 minutes on TOG related activities. Princess L and Princess M will also be assigned to help with lunch prep. Yep - I'm crazy!
Princess M will have a one hour preschool time with me broken up into a 45 minute time slot and a 15 minute time slot. These will be early in the morning. One of the seminars I attended at our homeschool convention years ago was by David Hazell of My Father's World. He talked about the importance of giving the youngest students the first time. Once they get their time with mom, they are usually more willing and able to play by themselves for a while. So, after her preschool time she will have a half hour learning video (one of many I have on hand) and then after our snack time she will have a 45 minute room time. This will be challenging to begin with, but I plan to keep her Leapster away at other times and let her have it during her room time. For now, I am scheduling a nap time in the afternoon. It is a shorter time than she usually takes right now. But generally when they turn 4, I am less concerned that the nap happens. It will probably turn into an extended afternoon room time by the end of the year - but who knows. Princess S would have continued taking naps at 4 if she wasn't sharing a room with Princess E at the time. Finally, the youngest two princesses will have a half hour TV time at the end of our scheduled time so that I can work on dinner.
I have schedule myself a half hour meeting time with both of the older princesses each day. This time will be to go over the previous day's work, doing some narrations (which will be new to us,) and going over any new questions that come up. I also have some assigned some "office hours" for myself. These will be specific times that the older two princesses can count on me to be willing and able to interrupt what I'm doing to answer questions or help. This has been one of their complaints - that I'm not available when they need help. (I would counter that by saying that neither of them generally asks for help - just do the work and cross it off and worry about corrections later - and when they do it is after having wasted a lot of time and right before I need to be doing something important.)
So without further ado, here is our daily schedule goal for next year:
2011_2012 Daily Schedule
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