I Have a Confession to Make.......

I have a confession to make. This will be my 6th year homeschooling, and I have never written lesson plans. Really. Two years I did use Sonlight with Chelsea and the lesson plans are already written for you but I have never written out lesson plans. I have a general idea of what I want to accomplish and gather my materials at the beginning of the work. That is changing this year. I am sitting down over the next couple of weeks and actually writing out lesson plans (allowing time of course for interest-led learning and other things that may develop during the year.) There are a few reasons I am doing this. With 6 children, it is getting harder to stay organized. Organization does not come naturally to me and I want to be more successful at it. Another reason is that Chelsea will be starting High School this year and I need to keep more specific records of the work she is doing. We also are involved in a lot of different activities, and I think it will be easier for me to work on our school plans while we are not doing "school."

I found a wonderful 2010-2011 Homeschool Planner at http://www.theoldschoolhousestore.com/. This down loadable planner came includes everything you need for home and household planning that you can possibly imagine. It is over 600 pages long and includes many different kinds of interactive forms (that you can type and print out for each child) many different homeschooling articles, calenders, chore charts, and lots of different printouts of interest to homeschoolers (ex. metric conversion charts, Life and death of Jesus Christ, Presidents and their wives, handwriting forms, nature journals, book logs....many many more.) You can chooses the forms that you need and print out only what you want to.

So, I am working on planning out our school year. Each of my children keep a notebook (or sometimes 2) divided into sections for subjects. In the front of each notebook will have a calender, chore chart, and weekly schedule. Wish me luck as the planning begins!