Friday, August 31, 2012

A RARE update! A couple of changes. 2012

It sure has been a while since I updated this puppy! I'm looking the new school year in the face and, once again, I'm going to be trying things a little different. Every year seems to need a little fine tuning. Maybe one day we'll have it down pat. But then I wonder if, as the needs of the growing children change, so will the need of the home school?

So what is NOT going to change? We are not going to change our relaxed ways. We are not going to change our eclectic curriculum style (I use a mix of traditional, unit studies, and anything else that floats my boat). We are not going to change schooling year round.

What are we going to change?
1- Introduction of workboxes. I've seen where several other families use this format for organization. The subject bracelets we started off with last year worked great for a few weeks. Then the newness wore off and bracelets started getting lost. It was one of those good ideas in theory. Not so much practically.

I have this in mind:
20 Drawer Mobile Organizer
Each box will contain one subject per child and all the supplies they need. I will probably use color coded stickers so that each child will know which box is their boxes. Or I could just get this version and the boxes are color coded for me. Haven't made up my mind yet. Each school day they can just start at the top and work their way down until all subjects are completed for the day. And I'll store all the teacher's manuals in magazine holders on the bookshelf.

I'm always on a quest for better organization, it seems.

2- Our school year start date. By this, I mean when we will start the next year's curriculum. Yes, we school year around but only with certain subjects (particularly Math). But some subjects, once finished for the year, will wait until the next school year before we start back. We previously started new curriclum on the first Monday of August. We tried to sort of loosely follow the public school schedule. But I find that we do our own anything anyway and breaking at different times than the PS does not seem to affect us negatively.

So we are going to start the new school year in January this year. I love the idea of being able to come back strong after a holiday break. The end of the year is always a little more active for us with field trips and holiday activties. It makes more sense to make the end of the actual year the end of our school year. We would be finishing up curriculum and having a little more spare time for breaks.

So that's the main changes we'll be trying as we enter year number THREE! I can't believe two years of homeschool are behind us. Looking forward to many more years!

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