Lesson Plans 2013-2014

I have a new approach to lesson planning.  I really like the idea of having a full year planned out, but not having to rearrange things when those pesky interruptions from life occur.  It finally occurred to me that I could make up the plans but only put them in my lesson plan book a week, month or whatever at a time.  Let me explain.

I take a subject, open up a Microsoft Works document, and input all the lessons from the resource we are using.  For example, we are using The Nature Connection for nature studies this year.  I wrote out all the individual lessons from the book on my MW document.

I repeat the process with all the subjects.  Yes, even the “next page” daily assignment subjects and workbooks (personally this helps me get familiar with the work and skip some lessons I feel are unnecessary.)  I printed up all these plans and had them bound in a customized planning book.

This is the front of my planner (the Office Depot people put a clear cover on it…not exactly what I wanted.)  In the first section I have our yearly curriculum picks…

Then a reading list and attendance chart for both boys and a calendar and long-term planning page for me.  Next I added in the MW documents with each subject’s lessons.

Then I popped in a neat plastic divider page with a pocket for misc papers.

After this I put a two-page monthly calendar and 5 weekly pages I ripped from a planner from the dollar section of Target.

On these pages I plan out the week, plugging in the plans from the MW document.  Above you see August’s calendar and planning pages.  Then comes another pocket divider and September’s calendar and planning pages, and so on through December.  I like to start fresh with a new planner in January…gives me some incentive and a way to make any necessary changes to the design.

Now some of the resources I am using this year are not physical workbooks but downloaded documents.  These I printed up, put in page protectors, and assembled in a binder.  This way they are always handy and ready when we are.

Here are the lessons for our science unit on electricity.  In the back of this large binder I keep other homeschooling related materials…

such as a printed list of our book collection (compiled at Library Thing) and my copies of our yearly evals.  This system has so far helped me be as prepared as possible without going overboard.