Master Plan
I never realized how hard it would be to create an assignment schedule for the kids that would be easy enough for someone else (Grandma, Dad, etc.) to follow. When the baby comes, the kids will still need to be doing schoolwork, since they’re enrolled in a public CA charter school. Our advisor is wonderful, and will do her best to accomodate us during that time, but we’ll still need to have something to show as work samples.
So here’s my Master Plan… hehe. I created regular assignment sheets for them that include their regular curriculum materials (K12, primarily), and “alternative” schedules, for the times that they don’t have access to a computer, or are being taught by someone who isn’t familiar with K12. My oldest can work very well on her own, and she has instructions to just keep going with her K12 stuff unless there’s no computer nearby, but by younger daughter isn’t as intrinsically motivated, so switching her to textbooks is the best option. Textbooks are portable though, and assigning reading is easy, so most of the alternative schedules involve using textbooks.
KS will use the following for the alternative schedule:
- I’ve signed her up for an online writing class through Home2Teach. That will take the place of much of her language arts (composition/grammar). She’ll continue to work on her literature lapbooks, etc.
- For alternative history, she’ll switch to From Sea to Shining Sea, an American history text by Catholic Textbook Project. She has instructions to outline or summarize at least three of the scheduled readings per week.
- For alternative science, she’ll use Prentice Hall’s middle school science text on Human Biology and Health. She’ll continue to work on her bird biology coursework.
KR’s schedule is more complex. Here are her alternatives (grouped by the categories required by our charter):
- Writing and Grammar: Primary Language Lessons. On the days that this doesn’t involve writing, she has some fun grammar worksheets to do.
- Spelling: K12 Spelling 3… There’s no point in switching from this. She aces spelling. I pulled 4 units worth of work out of the spelling student pages, and stapled them together by unit.
- Literature: Houghton Mifflin’s third grade reading text and the practice book. It’ll be easy stuff for her, but that’s the point. It needs to be easy, but engaging, so she’ll do it on her own.
- History: A cheezy second grade text that I checked out from the charter school library. There are study guides for each chapter, so we’ll have some work samples to turn in at our advisor meeting on January 19th. I hate to do this, but unless she has access to a computer, her K12 history is out. I wish I could just assign her some chapters in Story of the World, but I don’t know that she’d draw, write or narrate anything from them, and we need at least a couple of work samples. Hmm. I need to work on that idea.
- Science: DiscoveryWorks third grade science. She can read and fill out the investigation reviews.
Like KS, KR reads a TON, so I’m not worried about her losing any educational time at all. I mainly just don’t want to vary their routines too much, because I think that with the new baby coming, the familiarity of the old routine will help alleviate any anxiety, both for them and for DA. Plus, as I’ve said, I still need to turn in work samples to the charter, so giving them some simple stuff to do will enable us to do that.
I have a folder for each of them for each week of January. In the front is their regular schedule, and their alternative schedules, with instructions to mark whatever work gets done.