Mulling Over Choices

As our school year settles in I find myself mulling over my choices for the school year.  Is our Language Arts curriculum fulfilling its purpose so far?  Does math make sense to all of us?  Do we have enough reading time?  Am I squeezing in enough history/science/geography?  Naturally, all this leads to; is my system for lesson plans working?   

I wrote about this some in my Methods To Madness post in August.  Because this is a new way of doing things (for me) I am probably overly critical about its functionality.  As a busy mom of 4 coupling typical life with Missions work, I don't like anything that wastes time and makes life more complicated! 

So here I sit, early this week, contemplating.  Does it really work?

Then I realized.... sick days, un-expected errands come up, some projects take longer than expected, and a whole plethora of interjections into our schedule will re-set our course.  The list method I am using is perfect for this and we have already been reaping the benefits! 

A teacher's planner would be nice but, for us, it is unrealistic to keep up with.  My list method allows us to pick up where we left off if something comes up.  It is especially handy when life's curve balls aren't all day, but half day.  Teacher planners set up the schedule based on a full day.  If we get the morning's activities done with the afternoon toasted up by something unexpected, I don't have to look spit-spot through a planner to find what is missing.


There are pros and cons to my system.  As a form of problem solving and tweaking it, I would like to build my next blog around that! 

As for today... I am excited to reveal my yahoo groups feature!  In my Methods to Madness article I offer to share my planner pages but I had trouble finding a (free) platform that could support unlimited file sharing.  I am part of a few Yahoo Groups and actually enjoy them!  It is FREE to get a yahoo address (if you don't already have one for collecting junk mail in!) and you can link the group to your main email address THROUGH yahoo... so you still don't need to log into more than one email account.  To sign up for my group just send a message to TheFaithfulHomeschool-subscribe@yahoogroups.com  Once you are registered, you will have access to all of the files that I upload for file sharing.  My first two were uploaded today:  My list form of Lesson Planning :-)

Happy Homeschooling!