Planning

Suddenly I realize the two weeks of our holiday break is nearly over! I meant to do so many things to prepare for heading back to school. This weekend will definitely be crunch time.

I did spend a little time looking ahead. I'm trying to change the way I do my lesson planning. I used to look ahead through one week's worth of the provided lesson plans, toss the things I thought JT did not need, then use the remaining items to form my lessons. Using this process, we really didn't find opportunity to add the 'fun' stuff and more advanced study I wanted to get into.

My new plan involves working in 20 lesson blocks. Since each of the testing days involves 20 lessons worth of material, I looked at our next tests to really see what they are looking for from these lessons, then removed all the material that had nothing to do with the tests or had little educational value. The remaining material leaves us with much more time to add our own things. For example, the science lessons would be spread out in tiny chunks over the week. I can compact one week of their material into one day and then expand with my own things when I look at the big picture and know that we aren't going to miss something vital by skipping ahead. In the next 20 lessons our science material covers the Earth and the Moon in very little detail. I have some really good books and movies that we can use to cover that more thoroughly. The language arts will spend a lesson or two working on analogies, but I plan to spend more time on those. JT has always been good with them but could work at a more challenging level. We are going to hold off on moving ahead in the provided math and instead really go into detail with fractions.

One more note, JT celebrated his 8th birthday today. He's a much happier kid than he was one year ago. I'm glad I have had the chance to bring him home and attempt to provide what he needs. I know we are going to have many challenges ahead of us, but we'll take those one day at a time.