Brain-in-a-book (what a relief!)

One of the things on my list for today, believe it or not, is to write a little bit for this blog.

I've been bustling around this week working on getting the school room tidied up for the upcoming school year. I also finally figured out how to get some planning done, turns out I really just needed a format.

I found it!

I tried so many ideas for planning my "soft" schedule (meaning it's not rigid) and at last I came up with this binder:

I am all about the binder this year. Each boy has one that will hold any notebooking pages or loose paper for each subject; Language Arts, Geography, History, Art, Latin, Science...you get the idea. I'm going to add a section for them to track all the books they've read. What a good feeling to look back over the titles you've worked through! They also have a tab for tests and scores. Keeping the important things!

I have several binders for myself; one for tutoring the Apprentice Class (this is a seperate lesson plan), one for important papers (all the love notes I get from the boys and can't bear to part with), one for my household paperwork, and one for school at home.

This school-at-home notebook is the one that calms my storming brain. (The window and the birdies beyond help too)

I have three sections in this notebook:

• Calendar (to mark what days we do school, holidays to remember)
• Weekly Lesson Plans
• Curriculum we use, books we read

The weekly lesson plan was the biggest for me. I need a calendar where I can loosely write down what we're studying with Classical Conversations so I can coordinate our home studies. I need a place to set goals with Math and reading. I need a calendar in which I can write up three separate plans for math, language arts and reading, AND coordinate our plans for history, science, latin, geography and reading. I needed a place to loosely list ideas for nature studies so that I can choose it, or not, depending what we stumble upon outside.

I'm really pleased with how it's all falling into place....which was the big problem. I couldn't think clearly for days because I had all these ideas bouncing around in my head, no where for them to fall.

At any rate, sometime I'll photo the school room but for now it's just cleaned out. Phew!

Going to spend the remainder of the week playing and filling out pages in my new favorite book. Next week pressing on to wrap up around-the-house-projects (namely a half-painted bedroom) and the following work I'll plan for tutoring.

Did I tell you what a relief it is to cruise through all my favorite homeschooling-family blogs & see that I'm not the only one who is rearranging almost everything right now? Truth is I'd love to paint the school room before class starts too, but let's not be silly now! It really does help to see all the photos of everyone else's chaos....this is our busy time of year, isn't it?

Have a wonderful day, and soon I'll post some photos of the mess....just have to zoom out. ;)