Friday, August 07, 2009

Curriculum and Changes

I've been working on our school schedule and curriculum for a couple weeks now. I want to start with the Church New Year(September 1) and base our year on Church Calendar. In the past we've used Story of the World for History, Math-U-See for well, Math; A Unit Study approach to Science from Tanglewood (which I love ). Explode the Code, Spelling Power, Paidea Classics for copy work, Critical Thinking Co. for Logic, Writing Strands and a hodge podge of other phonics methods for the boys.
I have this huge 3-ring binder that holds weekly lesson plans and I fit all 4 kids on one sheet. This year I was going to use one of those pens that has the 4 colors and write their separate assignments with that by giving them each a different color.
The problem is there too much to sort out and write down and well, I just want to try and streamline it and make it easier. I also would like to approach things differently with regards to L.A. and History. I have to say, I absolutely LOVE the Unit Study approach we did last year with Science. I would really like to try and do this with History as well and within these 2 topics as Unit Studies add into the units the L.A. I'd love to hear from anyone else who approaches their schooling in this way or something similar. I have some ideas that might work and would be fun but tell me what you do? Do you know any websites that talk about this? Share with me what you do in your home!
I'd love to discover a better way of recording my schooling projects and assignments on my laptop vs. having to writing everything down. I have Vista on here there is Windows Calendar. I also know about google calendar. I don't want some fancy home school record keeping program, just a simple calendar aid of sorts to write down what I want to accomplish each day for each child with the ability to "cut & past" or hit a recurring button or something like that. Any ideas?

1 comment:

Matt said...

I love explode the code, but with some of the illustrations were better.