The Learning Umbrella

 Ah, to be organized.  I am feeling pretty good about our school organization right now.  I’ve created systems that seem to work very well for Carbon, and I think the system for my sister is pretty good even if she is having trouble keeping up.  What she needs right now is a system for getting to bed and getting up at reasonable hours - that would help a lot!

But the part of her homeschool system that is working right now is the planner with week at a glance checklists.  I made it myself, with my comb binding machine, and it includes: month at a glance calendar pages, complete syllabi for her unit studies, and these week-at-a-glance checklist forms.  It really helps her to see the big picture of her day and her week, and she is supposed to do each thing on her list and bring it to Mom for sign-off.  Mom evaluates most of her work, but some of it is emailed to me or saved for a family Presentation Day.  J. has daily work that she just keeps plugging away at (Math, a reading program, German, exercise, piano), a little “Daily Fact” she looks up, and two unit studies at a time.

This system is very close to the system that I liked best from my own homeschooled years.  I had a daily planner, and Mom would write a list of assignments in it each week.  I could do them in any order I liked, as long as they got done by the end of the day.  I remember that system fondly, especially when I got to participate in setting my own assignments.  We still aren’t letting J. set her own assignments, but I’d like to get to the point where I give her the outline of a unit study and she fills in these forms herself, deciding for herself how much to do each day.

Carbon’s school system is a set of boxes.  We’ve just added a new box, so now we have four: Math and Science, Reading and Writing, Spanish and World Studies, and Music and Art.  There are hanging files in each box, and each file has one days work in it.  He chooses the order, but we sit down together and go through all four boxes during the naptime the daycare kids and Hypatia take.  Daycare Baby is usually up, but that’s the only distraction.

It’s not a huge amount of work for him yet, but we are spending about 1 1/2 hours of concentrated sit-down time.  One day last week I laid out everything from his four boxes:

I try to make sure each day will have some variety, but sometimes it doesn’t work out that way.  But that’s the goal, to have a few books to read, a game to play, something active like an experiment or an art project, and a workbook page.

I’m very happy with this box system, and I think we will continue using it for the rest of preschool and most likely for the rest of his early elementary years.  It works well for us.