How Do I Plan?

***Heart of the Matter Readers, I am posting this in the Friday Meme for "How Do I Schedule." This particular post is about how I plan each individual unit I write, and was written a couple months ago. Recently, planning has been a hot topic for me, and I have written huge plans for the rest of this year and next. If you are interested in reading those as well, please look on my left sidebar under 2008-2009 Preschool Plan or any of the posts labeled "Planning." Have a great weekend! ***

Happy Monday!

I just got back from a wonderful weekend training/retreat with my husband, and am slowly catching up on my emails. While I was gone I received this comment from my Recap and Looking Forward post:

"How do you plan??? What do you use to plan?? Do you write it down?"

I thought it would be more fun to dedicate an entire post to this question, instead of just replying back within the comments section, in case anyone else would like to see how we plan in our homeschool. Every homeschool is different, and I am sure we will change several times over the upcoming years, but this is how we do it in the current season we are in -- preschool!

When deciding what we are going to study next, I look to see if there is anything that the girls have been excited about lately or showing an interest in. We are very delight directed! Units we have studied most recently included music and the orchestra, Charlie and Lola books, Easter studies, and I am currently planning our upcoming units on space/astronomy and the human body! Our upcoming units are TOTALLY delight directed, as both of my girls are in a huge Magic School Bus kick and love the episodes and books about these subjects! I will go more into how I plan each week in a bit.

As for planning in advance, which is what I was talking about in that particular post, it is a rough plan because I can never tell what their current delight will be, but there are often times when they become delighted in the new book/unit I begin as well. So to begin I just look at all of the wonderful books and units in Before Five in a Row (for right now until we start FIAR) and Homeschool Share. These are definitely my biggest resource for ideas and units. I also check out Letter of the Week for their list of themes and their book list. I did try to do this curriculum before, but it just didn't fit our family the way it is written.... However, it is a wonderful resource for ideas and supplements! For the coming year, I also took out my book from Bright Beginnings to see the unit studies they had planned for the year and wrote those down. I looked to see which ones I did not want to do, and the ones that I did, I looked to see if a particular book on the BFIAR, FIAR or HSS list would complement it. I also look at the calendar to roughly plan it out, as I know there are certain holidays or events in the year that would determine the type of units we would do. I do write all this down on paper first and then input it into an excel spreadsheet for reference. At that point, my rough plan is done -- I know which books I would like to read the upcoming year, if I think there are a few that would go well together to either supplement or to do an extended multi-book unit with, a rough idea of how many weeks in the upcoming year and when holidays fit into that year.

As for weekly unit plans, I will use what I am doing for my upcoming Astronomy unit as an example. I first reached out to my HomeschoolShare yahoo group for any ideas for a VERY interested 3 year old, for books and ideas that would be a good fit for her age (Cali, my 2 year old, is also interested, but it is definitely my oldest that is inspiring most of our delight directed studies). They gave me some amazing resources and ideas, in particular my girl Candace who had studied this very thing during her Creation studies last summer! I then took her book list, added it to the recommended books from the HSS yahoo group, and my own ideas I had come up with, and logged onto my library's website. I first looked for the books and videos on my list and then searched for other items in the picture book section or media section on the topic. I LOVE my library website! I find what I want, place a request and ask for it to be held at my library's drive thru! Depending on which library in the system it comes from, it could take anywhere from 2 days to a week to come in, so I do have to plan a bit in advance, but the ease makes it so worth it!

If I am using a pre-packed unit from HSS or even BFIAR, I follow the basic guidelines of studying Social Studies on Monday, Language Arts on Tuesday, Art/Music on Wednesday, Math on Thursday and Science on Friday. If there are several lessons listed for each subject, I pick the ones that are best suited for my girls ages and the ones I find the most interesting, and we cover those. I do write those down on a piece of paper for my reference each day.

If I am writing it myself, obviously it is a bit more time intensive, but I do stick to the same daily guidelines as it helps plan and keep it manageable. I will gather all of my resources, put aside the videos that we want to watch and make a quick note, especially if it fits with a particular topic that might be studied later in the week, and then move onto the books. I will most likely pick one or two books to use as our main source that we "row" each day, and then fill in with all the other books for supplement. I will try to spread these throughout the week. As for the books that we plan to "row", I read them with paper and pen in hand. I write down each of my subject headings and as I read, I put down ideas for lessons under each subject. Normally this will require me to go and do additional research online later to flesh out these ideas, but right now it is just a word or sentence. I do this a couple times to make sure I didn't skip anything that I would want to cover, and then I hop on the Internet. I look up definitions, look for fun ideas, activities, crafts, games and information that relates to the topic, and look for online videos and games to play that would complement it as well... both girls LOVE sitting in front of the computer and feeling grown up! I try to limit it to a couple lessons each day tops, and then just fill in the day with a lot of reading and playing. For this particular unit, I will most likely stretch it out beyond just a week since they do have such an interest and there are so many wonderful resources!

I hope this made some sort of sense and was helpful! As you can see, I love talking about this stuff, so don't hesitate to ask questions!