Planning for 2017 - Step One

I'm cutting it really, really fine. We're less than a month before we're going to start school, and I haven't really made my plans for the year.

Looking for inspiration in the stars

I thought it might be fun - perhaps instructional - for other homeschoolers to watch me fumble through my plan for 2017-2018.

As you may have gathered if you've followed me for any time, I have four children aged between 10 and 17, and I teach them all together using the Charlotte Mason method.

aka Killer, Rocky, Phoenix, and Timmy

There are shades of interpretation for the CM method, and while there are a lot of purists out there, I'm not one of them. To my mind, Charlotte Mason - genius as she was - was still a classroom teacher and planned, implemented, and managed her philosophy via the lens of being a classroom teacher.

I know ... sacrilege, right?

Well, I'm a former classroom teacher, too, and know for a fact that what one does in a classroom is not what one necessarily needs to do in their living room with their own children.

So, I have taken to heart CM's short lessons, living books, narration/copywork/dictation, while devising my own plan of subjects and scope/sequence.

We always study the Bible, memorize Bible verses, use a math curriculum for each child such as Life of Fred or Shillermath, and then have a stack of books for English literature, philosophy, science, biography, spiritual lives, history, economics, and geography. We work through our stack a little each day, reading in 15-20 minute intervals, and by this step-wise approach, we will usually complete many of the books we start out with in September. (If we don't, we just let them carry over till the next year).

Here's a book that took us over 2 years: celebration!

Added to this, we have a weekly co-op in my house. Last year, we studied Texas History and Biology. Tomorrow, I'm going to discuss with my colleague about this year's plan, but it looks like it will be US Government and Chemistry.

My high schoolers have also been attending outsourced online courses for five years now: both have completed four years of English, and now are working their way through Ancient History and Spanish. All these are undertaken with Dreaming Spires Home Learning, my own international tutorial company where I'm in charge of the English.

Online doesn't have to mean isolated

But what will be our book list for our morning time together? And how am I going to implement my new planning approach with simple spiral notebooks?

These are the questions I'm seeking to answer over the next two weeks, and you're invited to join me on my journey.

Even homeschoolers with more than a decade of experience will have their confusions, uncertainties, and conundrums. What we probably also have is an overall vision for our kids, and an underlying routine.

The New Look of Narration

Following the Charlotte Mason method as I do, we are always reviewing our reading and studies for the day by using a technique called narration.  In simple terms, this is just "telling back" what we've just read, and is undoubtedly a brilliant way of remembering information: much better than fill-in-the-blank, or short answer, or even asking kids questions and having them respond.

Narration is telling back what you've just read.

(As an aside, I recently did a test of its effectiveness by narrating some of my own reading to myself by writing down summaries, versus just carrying on without reviewing after I'd read. My memory and understanding of the material I narrated was far superior to that which I didn't narrate, and I still remember now the things I summarized, but not the things I didn't!)

Today's task was based on the Chemistry and Physics book, new from Apologia Science, in which we have been studying matter, and more recently, different properties of gold and iron pyrite such as magnetism, hardness, smell, and reactions to chemicals.

Using a graduated cylinder to observe volume.

We narrated this yesterday by discussion, but today, Killer has gone one step further and made a Pivot video. I think he won't be forgetting this science lesson in a long time!

Hope you enjoy!