Changing How I Plan

I have been working hard to get my school year plans together in time to start next week. It's quite a challenge with my boys going into Grades 12, 10, 8, 5, and K. And then there's the 1-year-old. I am using The CMEC with a few tweaks and adjustments.

The past few years, I always made a comprehensive timetable (schedule) that laid out each school day for each child. This worked extremely well for me. Our school days were focused and ran as smoothly as I thought possible with four students plus baby or preschooler. There was never any question in anyone's mind what anyone should be doing at any given time...we just had to glance over at the big schedule posted on the wall. Moreover, while each day of the week was different, every Monday, every Tuesday, etc. of the term followed the same pattern so we were able to get into a comfortable groove. 

 

However, while all this has been an incredible and often painful workout for my executive functioning skills --have I ever told you how much I hate planning?-- it really has been doing very little for my students' executive function. I've been feeling more and more convicted as my oldest sons' high school years slip away that they really need to practice doing this for themselves. But how could I let go and have our days still go smoothly?

Changing gears is so hard for me. I just didn't have the mental energy to figure out how to do this in the last couple of years with a challenging pregnancy in 2023 and a baby who needed surgery (cleft lip) in 2024. But this is our year. 

I've made a skeleton timetable for my oldest three. (I'm doing a regular timetable for my fourth in grade 5 and a loose one for my fifth in Kindergarten.) It is a weekly spread that includes all the things we do together, like meals, daily news, chores, Shakespeare, Plutarch, and picture study. And then it has blank space. They will have to fill in when they're doing each subject. 

I have also scheduled a daily check-in with all three (at different times) to make sure they are:

    -filling in the timetable

    -logging work completed as they go along (I'll have them mark on their timetable itself)

    -orally narrating any lessons that they haven't done a written or drawn narration for

    -doing work in their Book of Centuries, Commonplace, and Nature Journals 

I am sure we will be adjusting a lot of things as we go. Please don't take any advice from me on this yet...I am just sharing a work in progress. I am hoping that as time goes on and they get used to this we will be able to check in weekly rather than daily. But I know they will need the accountability and coaching at first.

There is an added challenge this year as my oldest is taking a university course, and the oldest two are taking a composition class from Wildwood Learning Centre. These things are completely new to us so it will probably take a little while to figure out how to fit in homework, etc.

I will try to come back periodically and share how it's going. 

Family Picture Taking Shenanigans

 

These days, we just embrace the messy and crazy, or we would never have any family pictures at all. Stephen took these ones a few weeks ago.

Canada: A People's History - Our Schedule

 Someone emailed me to ask how we have used Canada, A People's History in our homeschool. I answered the email, of course, but thought I should put this information out there for everyone who wants to use this resource for Canadian history.

I loved this from the forward by Mark Starowicz:

“This is a narrative work, not an academic work. I was reminded of the importance of this when a high school teacher stood up in the huge plenary session of the conference Giving the Past a Future in Montreal in January 1999 and said, ‘There has been a narrative cleansing of Canadian history.’ He is right. We have bleached the dramatic narrative out of Canadian history and reduced it to social studies units in our schools. If you want a sociological history, or a military or diplomatic history, seek elsewhere. If you want to get a sense of what it felt like to be an eleven-year-old girl in the Loyalist exodus, a nineteen-year-old Hudson’s Bay Company clerk seeing the Rocky Mountains for the first time, or a terrified eighteen-year-old Acadian refugee at the Plains of Abraham, then this is the right book.”

We have used this 2-Volume set from grades 7-10 in our homeschool, though it could be used through grade 12, in my opinion. My third grade 7 student is now working through "Year 1" below, and I still really love these books. They are well-written and quote quite a bit from original sources. We usually do one 40-minute Canadian history slot each week for reading and written narration, and then at the end of the week we watch some of the TV series (available on YouTube) with the whole family. It would be no problem to let the books stand alone, though.

Content warning: There is a little bit about native spiritual/sexual practices at the beginning of Volume 1 that I didn’t feel comfortable with for this age and censored for my children.  This was an issue in the corresponding video too. It's at the bottom of page 3 and into page 4.

Also, as you get into the Modern era in Volume 2, I would recommend prereading as there are more mature and complex issues that you may wish to discuss with your high school students.

Year 1: 

                Term 1: pp 2-27 (…’then a star was lost in the sky never to be seen again.’) 

                Term 2: pp 27-55 (…’and the race to the New World began with new fervour.’)

                Term 3: pp 55-74 and 180-186 (…’new commercial relationship had been established.’)

Year 2:

                Term 1: pp 76-103 (…’she died in 1755’)

                Term 2: pp 103-135 (‘…his lofty ambitions were finally achieved.’)

                Term 3: pp 135-162 (…’almost 60,000 would be recently arrived Americans.’)

Year 3:

                Term 1: pp 162-178 and 218-243 (…’at the expense of the whole Canadian people.’) 

Please note that I skipped chapter 6 (except for a few pages at the end of Year 1) only because there was so much material to cover this year and we had already read a lot of supplementary living books on the explorers.

                Term 2: pp 243-285 (…’The surveyors withdrew.’)

                Term 3: pp 285-292 and Volume 2 pp 2-50.

Year 4: 

Please note that this year’s reading load was particularly heavy, and I did two Canadian history slots per week instead of one. Looking back, I think it may have been too much reading, and next time I might cut some out and highlight some of the main stories. But that’s a big job. I had students in grades 10 and 8 when we did this. I think ideally I would prefer to do this era no earlier than grade 9 or 10.

                Term 1: pp 52-136

                Term 2: pp 138-236

                Term 3: pp 238-322

I hope this helps some of you! I'd love to hear from you if you have used this series, and what you think of it.

Best Reads in 2024

These are not necessarily in order: 

Top Five Fiction 

The Road 

Les Miserables 

To Say Nothing of the Dog 

I Cheerfully Refuse 

The Princess Bride 

Top Five Nonfiction (except for Biography and Memoir) 

Much May Be Done with Sparrows 

Life Together 

Rembrandt is in the Wind 

Love Thy Body 

The Omnivore's Dilemma 

Top Five Biography and Memoir 

Beyond Mere Motherhood 

Being Elizabeth Elliot (also Becoming Elizabeth Elliot) 

Elizabeth Elliot, A Life 

The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street 

The Life and Thought of David Craig 

Top Five Fiction Rereads 

Jane Eyre 

Persuasion 

Mansfield Park 

Jayber Crow 

The End of the Affair 

Top Nonfiction Rereads 

Surprised by Oxford 

84, Charing Cross Road 

Midnight in Chernobyl 

A Child's Christmas in Wales 

Ina May's Guide to Childbirth 

What about you? What did you read in 2024? I'd love to hear your recommendations!