Tackling Our Lists: Homeschool Version

Next thing on my list:  Homeschool Planning.  As with Spring Cleaning, I'm going to start by gathering up what I've done in my past and then try to figure out where to go from here.

Chari and I plan to write about How We Homeschool.  I am guessing we will get to that during this summer.  But for the mean time, if you read this blog you already know we are literature-based and that is what you will see if you follow the links below.

By the way please pray for Chari.  I believe she is working four 12 hour OB/GYN shifts this week!

And there is a chance I may be driving past her house this weekend and we might even want to spend the night!  Would you do that to a friend?

 But then, the second time I ever visited Chari, I dropped in on her with my six kids when she was in labor with her sixth!   And she even thanked me (I did get to take care of her kids for her and host her oldest's 13th birthday party, so maybe she wasn't thanking me for lacking proper guest boundaries : )).

Anyway, back to Homeschool Pre Planning and lists of links.  The pictures are just gratuitous planning-related ones to break up the word flow.

When I was looking through old blogs I realized I never really wrote much on How I Plan.  I wrote all kinds of planning posts but unlike my Spring Cleaning challenges which are more or less self-contained and easy to link to, my homeschool planning sprawls all through the school year and is usually very much specific to a certain child at a certain time in our lives.  Which is fine but this year when I feel like I'm starting from ground zero, not as helpful as I would like.   I want a step by step tutorial on how I do things!

So here's what I could find.    You don't have to look through all these links.  Mostly I just wanted to have it compiled in one place so I don't have to search for an hour next time to find everything.

• I wrote a series on my planning back in 2007 which is indexed here:  Planning Posts.

(there are also some planning posts from 2010 linked there)

• There are a whole bunch of forms and planning documents I made mostly in 2007-2008 which I linked here: Master List of Forms.  

• Finally, a couple of years ago when Kieron started high school I had a blog where I put his lesson plans:  Year 9 Dashboard.    On the sidebar you can see links to the other "subject" blogs.   We had come off a year of K12 and I was trying to preserve what I liked about their set-up while tailoring it to us.    I absolutely LOVED working on this.   Totally the most fun I ever had planning, and we actually did it for about 6 months before I ran out of steam.   

• That year I also made a Catholic Studies blog to help me get ready for my youngest twos' first communion.   I did a couple of other blogs which I won't list here.  The flexibility of online and paperless formats works just great for me.  

In Addition:

A friend of mine with many children ages 4 up to 27 developed her own syllabi for her children and updates it every year.    You can find the 2011 version at St Thomas School Free Curriculum.   I like them because they are so simple and because they are similar to my type of homeschooling with lots of books and a few textbooks.  When I am working on homeschool planning, I usually use this model to get me started.   Since I am easily confused, having the syllabus set up very simply with lots of white space is very helpful for me.   

This reminds me Who and what this is all for, and that I am not on my own:

And these leftover Hershey's chocolate eggs from Easter also remind me of hope and joy and promise and that the world is created good and abundant  : )