Reflections on Relationship: A Planning Series

So, it's that time of year where I see many bloggers posting their plans for the upcoming school year.  I love reading planning posts.  I love making checklists and organizing new books.   I love sharp pencils and new notebooks.  I love just about everything about starting a new school year and always have.

 

That said, I haven't made any new checklists or organized anyone's binder yet.   That aspect of planning comes very naturally to me - so much so that it is easy for me to jump straight to that part of the process without considering the 'why' behind what we are doing.  This has been especially true in the last year or two.  Since returning to the States in May, I have come to realize that I have been functioning in survival mode for…well…for a long time.   Now that we are here in the US again, at least for now, I am slowly starting to replenish some of what has drained away.  Part of that process is thinking through where we are and where we need to be in our family and in our homeschool, and taking those ideas into consideration when I start choosing curriculum and making checklists.  I want to be sure that we are using our time in the best possible way - being intentional to work towards our goals - and not just flying on autopilot.

 

I have been re-reading sections of When Children Love to Learn (Cooper, et al) as part of my reflection time this summer.  This quote in an early section really struck me:

 

"Charlotte Mason's educational ideal was not to remove us from the ordinary but to enrich us, each one, with the best possible relationships…with God, with people in our family and community, with others through books, art, or music, and with God's creation." (p.35)

 

 

The end of Charlotte Mason education is far more than the books and materials that are included on my nice checklists.  The end is relationship – and not just any relationships, but the best.  The relationships that will enrich us and help us become human beings fully alive.  That is really the point of the living books and the narration and the nature study and habit training.  Those things are not ends in themselves, they are the means of helping us to develop those relationships appropriate to us as human beings.  (See more about this in Charlotte Mason's Third Volume, School Education, Chapter VIII 'Certain Relations Proper to a Child').

 

These relationships fall into four basic categories: relationship with God (what Charlotte Mason refers to as 'Knowledge of God' in her writings), relationships with the people in our family and community ('Education is an atmosphere' and 'Education is a discipline'), relationships with 'others' - Mankind, if you will - that we develop through our books and other studies ('Knowledge of Man'), and relationship with God's creation ('Knowledge of the Universe').   I have been reflecting on ways that I can help to enrich our relationships in each of these four areas so that I can ensure that my priorities are straight when I get to the more nitty-gritty-checklist-making part of my planning process.   What does it look like to enrich these relationships?  And how can we do that, practically speaking?  I hope to share some of those reflections in posts to come.

 

My Ambleside Planning Process: Week by Week

Here is the final (and shortest) installment of my Ambleside Planning Series.

 

You can read the other parts here:

Part 1:  Year by Year Planning

Part 2:  Term by Term Planning

Part 3:  Day by Day Planning

Part 4:  Week by Week Planning (You are here!)  

 

Because I have put a lot of work into determining and organizing the flow our year, terms, and days already, there really isn’t much that I need to do on a week by week basis.  I do like to take the time to skim and (if needed) pre-read our reading assignments for the week.   This helps me to get a sense of where we are going as well as helping me gage how to spread our readings out over the week.

 

This has been fairly easy to keep up with for Year 1 since the reading load is fairly light, and Michelle has been my only student in an official AO Year.  But at times when I have needed to prioritize, I have found that the items the most important to look over ahead of time for Year 1 have been history, Parables from Nature, and Shakespeare.   I may need to do a bit more than that for Year 2 this coming year since I will be handing Michelle a couple of her books to read on her own – I need to know what is happening in those books too. J

 

Here is a sample page from the pre-reading notebook I keep.

 

As I read, I jot down some simple notes in a notebook which I can then keep and refer to over the week as needed (and also save to refer back to when I have multiple children in multiple AO years!!)   The kinds of things I look for when skimming and pre-reading:

 

• List of names of important characters and places in the story (I list these out on the whiteboard before we read so that Michelle can refer back to them in her narration.  This has been helpful to her in retaining these names, since before I started this I got a lot of “this guy” and “that guy” sort of stuff from her.)
• Any vocabulary that may be key to understanding the story.   I don’t go overboard with this defining every single word that she may not know in the text since many words can be deduced from their context.  But occasionally, especially in the difficult stories like Parables from Nature, it can make a difference between enjoying and getting the point of the story or getting really frustrated with it.  For example, in our last assigned Parable, we talked about the words “obstinate”, “accommodating”, and “mutual” before we started.
• Any visuals that might help to bring the story to life?   Depending on the story, sometimes googling a picture of the person, animal, or item or studying a map of places mentioned can help bring the story to life.  
• Any discussion points that come to mind.
• If the story is too long to read in one sitting, I might make a note of how many readings to split it into and where to stop each section.

 

This may seem like a lot, but I don’t do all of these things for everything we read.   While I find it helpful to know what’s coming and be aware of any particularly long or difficult readings, it’s is also important NOT to overdo it.  We don’t need burnt out mamas trying to correlate everything together beautifully, nor do we want to err on the side of doing too much for our students and prevent them from discovering and learning and making their own connections for themselves.  You may find the post that I guest-posted at Afterthoughts about lesson planning a while back helpful to see how this preparation work plays out in real life for us.

 

And that brings us to the end of our little series.  I hope that it has been helpful!  (Hey, just writing it all out has been helpful for me – it’s given me a checklist to work from so I don’t have to scratch my head wondering if I missed something!)

My Ambleside Planning Process: Day by Day

Here is part three of my Ambleside Planning Process, what our daily schedule/routine looks like.

 

You can read the other parts here:

Part 1: Year by Year Planning

Part 2: Term by Term

Part 3: Day by Day (You are Here!)

Part 4: Week by Week (Coming Soon)

 

Originally, I had intended to write about my weekly planning first, and then my daily planning, but actually I find it makes more sense to share our daily plan/schedule first.

 

Our daily plan is basically a block-type schedule, although it functions more as a flow chart for a routine than a true schedule.  I do pencil times in when I am planning, but that’s mostly to be sure my time estimates are reasonable (in other words to reassure myself that, yes, on a ‘normal’ day we can get through all of this by lunch!).  I don’t hold myself to time very tightly though.  We do one thing, and then the next, and then the next.   One of the keys to CM scheduling is the principle of alternation – changing up the type of work you are doing regularly to keep from getting bogged down and help keep focus and attention sharp.   Each block in our schedule is sort of different, and I try to alternate between various types of work within each block too.

 

This basic scheduling format has been working really well for us for over a year now.  We do tweak it here and there on occasion, and I’m sure I’ll have to do some major tweaking a couple years down the road when I have three official students. J   But for the moment our days look something like this:

 

 

Block One: Michelle works through her independent checklist while I finish up my chores and helping little ones with chores and do 20 minutes or so of preschool/Kindergarten type work with them.

 

Block Two: Michelle and I sit down at the table.  I look over her independent work and hear her narrations from reading she has done independently.   If we are on a new Math U See lesson, I work through that with her (this is only once a week or so).  On the other days we do about 10 minutes of math drill and about 10 minutes of math enrichment.

 

Block Three: Morning Tea Time.   This is our snack and whole-group/circle time.  I posted about what our tea time looks like here, so I won’t repeat at that.

 

Block Four: Activity – Science experiment, drawing, or nature study/journaling.  This isn’t daily – we tend to keep Mondays and Fridays lighter, so this is the block we skip on those days.  I pick and choose which activity we will do on a given day based on time, weather, and what kind of ‘break’ we may need at the moment.  (So, if everyone’s getting crazy, we call it a nature study day and go outside for a while. J)

 

Block Five: Michelle and I return to the table and finish up any language arts work that we need to do (spelling, writing a notebook page, etc) and French.  We read and narrate our Ambleside readings that we do together.  (If we need to do two that day, we do one at the beginning of this block, then do the tablework, and then do the second.)

 

Et voila!  Because of the work I have put into the checklists at the start of the term, it is easy for me to check and see what I need to plug in to each spot on our daily schedule as we go along.  (“Oh, what’s next?  An Ambleside reading.  Let’s look at this week’s reading list and choose one.”)  This has worked out to be a good compromise between structure and flexibility for me.   I can easily swap blocks around (or even skip a block if necessary) to go with life’s ebb and flow.  And I don’t necessarily assign specific activities or readings to specific days – we can see how things are going each week and adjust accordingly.

 

Next time, I’ll share with you what I do at the start of each week to help keep us on track. 

 

My Ambleside Planning Process: Term by Term

Here is part two of my Ambleside Planning Process, how I plan out the nitty-gritty details of each term.

 

You can read the other parts here:

Part 1: Year by Year Planning

Part 2: Term by Term (you are here!)

Part 3: Week by Week (Coming Soon)

Part 4: Day by Day (Coming Soon)

 

About a month or so before the start of a new term, I will begin tackling the following:

Translate the readings and other assignments I divided into categories into checklists: one for our group readings and activities, one for each student I will be working on one-on-one, and one for what I expect each student to work on independently (only Michelle at the moment). (For what it’s worth, Ambleside now offers chart-type schedules on their website and if you like that format, you can skip this step.  I still prefer to make my own. The link for the chart schedules are at the top of each year's weekly schedule page.  Here is the link for Year 2's)   This is mostly just for readings and things where I don’t want to lose track of what chapters or pages we are to read week by week.  I don’t create detailed assignment sheets for the more skill-based subjects such as math or spelling – we tend to just do the next thing in the book and move on as we are ready.   My checklists look something like this:

 

 

Here’s a closer shot:

 

 

I also create an assignment sheet for Michelle’s independent work, which looks like this:

 

 

You will see that this sheet has four check boxes next to each item – this sheet is designed to last four weeks.  This has worked out for us as a good balance between having to constantly reprint them and yet frequent enough that I can make changes as we go along if necessary.

 

I also make a supplies checklist for each week for any unusual supplies we may need for science experiments, art, or other projects – this is just so I have something I can reference quickly so I can gather what we need before we need it, if it is something I’m not likely to have handy.

 

Review our daily and weekly routines and tweak as necessary. (More on these in the next 2 posts).

 

Choose new memory work – poetry, Scripture memory, catechism and hymns (these things I choose for myself - we just follow the AO rotation for folk songs).  Prepare sheets or notecards to be slipped in the appropriate memory box or binder.

 

Collect timeline figures related to the term’s history readings. (I have the Homeschool in the Woods Timeline figures CD, and supplement with images from Google or Wikipedia.)

 

Move any files necessary to the Kindle or Tablet.  (PDF reference guides, music, ebooks that I may not have already downloaded, etc)

 

Stock up on printer ink and have a big ol’ printing party. J  I like to print everything that I think I may need for the term at once.  I find that when I do this, we can start the term and then just keep going from week-to-week without having to worry about printing.  Occasionally I miss something. But overall this system works well for us, and I’m not constantly scrambling to prepare each week.  In my case, I print:

• All checklists, schedules, and assignment sheets I have prepared
• Artist prints for the term (I print these on matte photo paper)
• Timeline figures
• Maps
• Notebooking pages (We mostly use very plain ones with a space to draw and some lines to write.  I also have a biography one we use sometimes as well as a Shakespeare one.  I don’t try to match up things according to specific topics or themes.)
• Memory work
• Any MEP math pages we may need to use (MEP is not our primary math curriculum, but I do use parts of it as a supplement to Math U See here and there)
• Copywork passages (This past year we have used Spelling Wisdom and things take from the AO Copywork Yahoo Group for copywork selections for Michelle)
• Pages for our family nature notebook.
• Any preschool worksheets and activities to keep handy for little ones who want to join in.
• Any other miscellaneous bits and pieces – did you find a neat artist biography you want to share?  Notes for your geography study? 

 

Once everything is printed, I file it all in the appropriate binders for easy reference.  I have (at the moment) three main binders for storing things:

 

My master plan binder (the purple one):

• Copies of all checklists and schedules
• A Calendar with planned holidays marked off, and where I anticipate we will begin and end each term
• Plastic sleeves with timeline figures and various styles of notebook pages
• Master free-reading list
• Supply list

 

Our Morning Tea Time binder (the white one):

• The Morning Tea-Time Schedule for the term
• The term’s group work checklist
• Bible reading schedule and related resources
• Memory work (poetry and folk songs anyway…Scripture, catechism and hymns we do at the breakfast table.  We use index cards and SCM’s Scripture Memory System for this.)
• French activities for the term (although I am horrible about keeping up with these…French has been kind of a disaster here.  Sigh.  But it is all in there, in case we do get to it.)
• Artist Study resources (paintings, notes, artist bio if we have one)
• Geography related resources (maps for reference, etc.)
• Composer Study resources, if any (background info about our composer or the pieces we are studying, if I’ve found anything interesting)

 

Michelle’s Independent work folder (the red one):

• Her daily checklist
• Her reading lists (assigned and free-read choices)
• Copywork selections
• MEP pages go into a separate MEP folder

 

I also keep folders for any preschool pages we might use, and nature notebook sheets go into the family nature notebook, obviously.

 

I usually take this opportunity to tidy up and reorganize our bookshelves as well, and toss or store papers from the previous term as necessary.  (We have to submit a portfolio, and I also keep a sampling for our own personal record as well.)

 

This may seem like a lot of work up front, but I find it is worth it to take a couple of afternoons or a weekend for intensive preparation, because then we can just move from week to week throughout the term without a whole lot of thought.  Then I don’t have to worry about this planning process again for several months.

 

Next time I’ll show you what I do to prepare week by week.  (Trust me, it’s not this long!  We’ve done the bulk of the work already!)

 

 

My Ambleside Online Planning Process: Year by Year

As I am currently in the thick of preparing to begin Ambleside Online Year 2 after the first of the year, I thought this might be an appropriate time to begin a little series on how I approach planning and scheduling AO in our home.  I am one of those planning geeks who enjoys going through the planning process, and this is one of the reasons that I don’t care for boxed curriculums with a scripted teacher’s manual.  But, I realize that for many people,  taking the booklist and schedule that Ambleside provides and then trying to translate that into what happens in your home day-by-day can be overwhelming.   I hope that outlining my process for you may be helpful for those who find planning for AO a little overwhelming.

 

As an aside: I won’t really be talking about this is this series, but using Ambleside also carries the understanding that you are making an effort to educate yourself in the philosophy and methods that Charlotte Mason espoused.  Ambleside is so much more than just a booklist!  If you aren’t familiar with CM methods, do be sure to check out the Charlotte Mason resources tab to the right.

 

Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to share my nitty-gritty planning process:

Year by Year

Term by Term

Week by Week

Day by Day

 

Let’s start with my big picture planning for the year:

 

A good 9-12 months ahead of time I:

• Look over the Ambleside Booklist for the Year(s) in question, including free reads.
• Consider any changes, additions, or substitutions I may want to make. (I find it helpful to check other people's comments and experiences with various books at the AO Forum, especially for those that may be unfamiliar to me.)
• Check the Ambleside rotations for picture study, composer study, and folk songs. (If you have children in Year 4 or older, check the Shakespeare and Plutarch rotations too.)
• Consider any other curriculum needs that we have (math, language arts, supplementary books, art supplies, etc).
• Check to see what books and materials I already own either as hardcopies or digitally.
• Check to see what books and materials (including music and free reads) are available digitally. 
• Purchase any hardcopy books and materials we need and arrange to have them shipped to us in Africa.

 This last item is the main reason I start so far ahead of time – it can take months for packages to reach us.  (The most reliable shipping method is by sea!)  I want to be sure that we receive all our books and materials in ample time for me to finish the planning process before the start of our new year.   If you live in the world of Amazon Prime, you can probably wait until a little closer to the start of your new year to begin this planning process. J

 

In the following months, I:

• Purchase and download any digital items needed (music, ebooks, maps, paintings for art study, etc.)
• Review books and materials we will be using – this may involve skimming and/or pre-reading and researching ideas others have shared about how they used the books on the Forum.
• Divide books and materials into three categories: things we will do as a group, things that I will do one-on-one with each individual student, and things I will have the student tackle independently. (These lists will be used to make my checklists once we get to Term planning).
• I also divide the free-reads (both Ambleside’s suggestions and other books I have chosen) into a family read-aloud list and an independent free-reading list for each child who can read independently. 

Part of  our list of family-read-aloud choices for this past year. Many of our books are on the Kindle, so this is our virtual ‘bookshelf’ for the children to choose from, if you will.   I like to snag the cover art off of Amazon to put on the list so the kids can scan their choices the same way they would on a real bookcase.

 

• For any subjects I am changing or adding in on my own, I make a plan to work these into the Ambleside weekly schedules.  For example, this coming year we are planning to follow our own schedule for Bible study rather than using the Bible readings scheduled for Year 2.  So, I will divide up the readings and any supplementary materials week by week so they will be ready to plug into my term checklists.  Same thing for the mapwork on Europe that I am planning to add in.

 I don’t do these things all at once,  I pick at them as I feel inspired and have a spare moment or two.   I do like to have them done at least a month or so before the first term starts so that I am ready to sit down and do my nitty-gritty term planning.

 

But that is for next time. J

 

 

 

Our School "Room"

If you are in the habit of reading homeschooling blogs at all, you’ve probably seen articles in which people document their beautiful, dedicated “school rooms”.   Bright, sunshiny, filled with Ikea furniture.  And while I enjoy seeing how others organize their things, I’ve never had the luxury of having a dedicated room for school.  We’ve varied from a plastic tub that traveled around with us to a closet next to our dining room table to a dedicated table in the living room.  But never a whole ROOM just for school.     Where DO you put all that stuff when you live in a small house?   So I thought I’d share what our school area looks like at the moment – how we make it work in our space.

 

I don’t know the exact dimensions of our current home, but I doubt it is more than 1000 sq. feet.   We have 1 bath, 3 bedrooms, a kitchen, and a fairly large open plan living/dining room.   It is part of a row of three identical houses all attached together – more like an apartment, but single level and with a yard.  It’s enough space for us, we don’t feel cramped, but if it was any smaller we would.

 

I should also mention that because we embrace a simple method of homeschooling, we really don’t have a ton of stuff.  Other than books that is.  Ahem.  (Yes, I do have Kindle.  Believe me when I say it would be MUCH MUCH WORSE if I didn't!  But I digress.)

 

We’ve sort of commandeered one end of the living room for our “school room”:

 

I took this photo standing in our front doorway.  The table in the foreground is our dining room table, and the kitchen off to the left.  Our school table is the one by the sunny window at the far end.  The sunny window overlooks our fenced in backyard, which is considerably less distracting than the playground out the front window.  The low shelf unit on the left of the living room contains the kid's toys, drawing stuff, and picture books.

 

 

Our school table doubles as a kids’ project table when we aren’t doing school, or overflow seating for guests.   

 

 

All of our “table” materials are stored on this shelf unit in the corner.  On the top shelf, each child has a magazine-holder to contain their particular books and papers as well as my purple lesson planning folder, a box of Kleenex, and our Scripture memory box, a Bible, and a hymnal.   The second shelf has activities to keep preschoolers occupied on the left, and math manipulative items on the right.  The bottom shelf has a few teacher’s reference items (such as the Math U See books), nature journals,  and Michelle’s history timeline book and portfolio for the year.

 

 

Over on this side, we have our whiteboard, which we proudly shipped over to Africa all the way from the good ol’ US of A so I could use it with magnetic letter tiles for word-building type lessons.  At least,  that was the idea.  Until we finally unpacked and mounted the thing on the wall to find out it’s not magnetic after all.  SIGH. So, it’s being used for drawing fun at the moment….(anyone have a good suggestion for something upon which to stick magnetic letter tiles that DOESN'T involve shipping another whiteboard over from the States?)

 

 

The rest of our “school stuff” is on this shelf over by the couch.  The top shelf is all of the current books we are reading that aren't on the Kindle (we usually do this type of reading on the couch).  The second shelf contains history/geography related reference and picture books, and the bottom contains science and nature related reference and picture books.  This makes them easy to grab if we want to look something up, and often the kids will pick them up and flip through them in their spare time just because they are accessible.  (In fact, this is what my three-year-old is doing as I type.  It makes my Mama-Teacher-Heart happy.)  The globe, world map and flag charts are also over here for quick reference as we read about various places.

 

 

All of the rest of our books and school materials live are in our “library” – aka, the great big bookshelf that lines one wall in James’ bedroom.   The girls share a room with each other, James shares a room with my books. And the laundry drying racks.  It  all works out, right?  ;-)

 

And that’s it folks, how we keep our “school” organized in a fairly small space.