Summer is Here!

Our school year is over for 2010-2011.  We do not do year round school, though I have considered it from time to time.  Actually, if it would not create a mutiny from my son, I would probably do a lighter version this summer.  However, my daughter is entering the public school realm this coming year and has no school during summer months, so I do not think it would go over real well, with my son who is staying in the homeschool setting. 

I am at the point of school, where I am cleaning up from this year and gathering the items to present for our end of the year review.  I am also finishing the planning and purchasing for the coming school year.  I know what I intend to use for the upcoming year, and a tentative plan for the following years.  I need to finish purchasing the items for this year and then I can begin the lesson planning.

My lesson plans are a little nontraditional in some ways.  I have found that I do not like to preplan entire years, months or even weeks in advance.  What I will do once I have all of the resources gathered that I intend to use for a subject is to break them down into bite sized sections to be covered in about a day's lesson.  I try to plan about a week less worth of days than I plan for their to be school days.  That helps to allow for our 'calamity days' that happen without having to totally rework the amount to do in any given day.  I will make what I call 'lesson runs'.  This is basically a list of the daily bite sized lessons that will be done in order.  I then can transfer the appropriate lesson from the different subjects' lesson runs to my official lesson planner as we get to the days that we need to do them.  If I were to write out my lessons in my calendar type lesson plan book ahead of time, something will happen.  Something will mess up my plans and then the entire book is out of kilter and, well, that bugs me. 

So, for the next three months or so, I will be cleaning, clearing, ordering, organizing and setting up our school for the school year of 2011-2012.  It is an exciting new year and I find great joy in starting the new year.