Easiest Lesson Planning Ever

Most summers, I spend two to three weeks pouring over catalogs and book lists selecting my homeschool curriculum for the year ahead.  I talk to lots of friends about what is working and what is tweaking, and I make notes and lists, until I am finally ready to sit down over a few long evenings with my computer and my credit card and order my supplies.  Usually, I look forward to this planning, it sort of gets the juices flowing for the year to come.

This year, as we wrap up our 5th year of homeschooling, I find myself much less interested in diving in to planning.  Perhaps because I am 8 months pregnant, or perhaps because I need to spend my time doing the homeschooling rather than planning it, I want my curriculum to come to me ready made.  This morning, I suddenly realized that it can.  All of the work that I have done over the last several years has paid off — everything we did this year worked!  So, I handed each child a spread sheet (below) and told them to fill out the book that they will need next year for each subject.  In every case, we are just moving one level up from what they did this year.  When we start our school year with a 3 month old, we will have no new routines to learn, no placement to tweak, we will just pick right up with what comes next.

I will still get to have a little bit of lesson planning fun in a few areas —

1. I have to plan a pre-K curriculum for the 4 year old.  I am going to do a mix of the circuit, some phonics work and some themed book baskets.  I might have my 9 year old daughter chose the picture books and set up the baskets.

2.  When the middle school history and science text books arrive, I will go through them and create a book list of mini units to go along with the major topics in the books.

3.  In the “practical life” area I allowed each child to choose some skills that they would like to learn.  So far, we are looking at typing, cooking and carpentry.  I promised to figure out a way to make that happen for those children.  The first two are easy, the last one, I’m not so sure, unless Grandpa wants to be more involved in our homeschooling.

4.  Our beloved art teacher is moving away, so I am going to have to teach art at home for the first time.  We are going to try Drawing with Kids, but I want to plan a history of art course as well, that the whole family can enjoy.

5.  I will order a few good literature choices to beef up our shelves for my oldest child.  For the rest of the children, we have such a wonderful home library at this point that I can just let them chose on their own.  They are voracious readers, so at any given time I expect that they will be reading a saint biography, some good literature, something light from the library (39 Clues, etc), and something for history.

Here is one more benefit that I just noticed — tomorrow, I am going to have each child fill out the same grid indicating what they did this year.  Voila — year end records, which I used to agonize over, done.  I will have to do some work on my own to type up their book lists from the past year, a very important part of our homeschool record.

In case you are curious, or working on your own lesson plans, I have filled in the grid below, so that you can see what we use.  It has taken us 5 years of trial and error to settle in to programs that we really like in all subjects, but as I said, this year it all worked!

Oh — I just realized that there is no Phys Ed on this list.  My kids are all big bike riders and play outside a ton.  We do tennis, swimming and skiing, the boys play Little League baseball and the girls take ballet.  So, I don’t run PE as a class.  One of the best parts of homeschooling?  No dodgeball.