Before the start of the year.

Trying to get back into the blogging habit means, I'm sorry to say, writing when I can't think of something to write. 

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It's late July, and I am just now pulling my schoolroom together as well as my outlined lesson plans for the year.

After a couple of years of having the desks separated, I've pushed them back into table formation.  This is mainly for H's convenience, because on Thursdays she'll be running language arts sessions (mainly phonics and memorization of nursery rhymes) with three kindergarteners, while my fourth-grader does independent reading and such nearby.  I think it'll also help me manage the two youngest on the other days of the week, though.  

The bigger two don't sit at the desks much anymore, but it's there if we need the table for something else, and they do store supplies in the drawers.

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Now that my youngest is five whole years old, I realized I don't actually have to lock away everything that could be dumped out on the floor.  I can put a box of colored pencils and another box of crayons on the bottom shelf.  I can stack trays of all the paper right out there where I can see it.  It's so freeing.

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What's going on this year?  Number one son will be off at college again, of course.  He got into the business school, which was the main unknown hanging over his head, and so things are looking good as far as he is concerned.  Number two, who turns sixteen soon, will have biology and algebra and English and driver's ed and American history and Swedish and art.  Number three, the eighth grader, has Latin and algebra (half time) and geometry (half time) and English and history and botany and also art.   What's great about those two kids is that nearly everything they are doing, I have been through once before, and I saved all my stuff, so maybe I won't have to reinvent so many wheels.  Botany and Swedish are new, but I have a workable curriculum for each.

The nine-year-old is sort of cobbling together a bunch of things.  He wants to learn Greek still, so I'm doing my best to feed that.  And he's got his math program, and language arts from Hannah, and he'll be starting the geography program I love so much this year.  For science, what he wanted more than anything was just to alternate doing kits with good read-alouds, and that sounds fun to me, so I'm going to give that a try.  We're going to start by building a Gauss rifle and learning about velocity and acceleration, I think.  After that I have a kit about collisions.  I don't know how long it will take to do those, so we'll start from there and then decide what to do next.

As for the kindergartener, who is already five and a half, well, all you really need to do is follow along in a math program, work on learning to read and write, and read aloud some books.  Have some art supplies available, I would normally say, except that this five-year-old doesn't spontaneously make art much.   They're all different.

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The years are much the same, in broad strokes.  A big binder labeled with the different subjects,filled with grade recording sheets I make myself, and the first few weeks' assignments ready to go.  The bookshelves behind me all newly rearranged and arrayed in their beauty.  A newly cleared-off counter:

And of course that sense that this year I'll totally be able to keep track of everything, no one will flop onto the floor making grunting noises, everyone will do all their assignments on time, nothing will take longer than the time I have allotted for it, and serenity will reign in our home.   I can enjoy it for a few weeks, anyway.

 

Comments

[Jenny]

What are you using for Botany? I tried to work a little botany into the readaloud mix two years ago, and my kids died slow agonizing deaths of agony. So next go around, I should probably try something else? Heh.

[bearing]

We're going to try the botany program written by Ellen J. McHenry, since we liked the geography program so much. It's called "Botany in 8 Lessons" but there's enough there to fill a middle school year, if you do enough of the optional activities. See her website at

ellenjmchenry.com