Working on planning school year

Yesterday I spent all day on this and will probably do the same today. I’m sorting out what to use for next year…As I think I’ve mentioned before, I really like the idea of using a history book as a spine (guideline) and add in other books to supplement not just the history, but also to add in the music/musicians, art/artists, science/scientists of the same time periods. This is looking like it could be really fun!

This year I’ve decided to use The Usborne Internet-Linked Encyclopedia of World History (below) as our spine. I’m starting to see the value in using it because there’s not a lot of text to read for each time period, so I can add in other books for that, and keep it interesting. I really liked the Story of the World series, and History of Us series, and plan to still use them as supplemental reading…but my kids were getting tired of them. Perhaps if they are not the main focus, they might enjoy them more. We’ll see.

Anyway, I was thinking I would plan out everything we’d do for the entire year but its starting to feel very daunting. Since I’m essentially creating things from scratch, pulling things together to build a new curriculum, it really might be easier to do it piece by piece. I’m thinking I need this outline so I can see where we will be going, but the individual books for each section might be easier to do as we go. It will mean a lot of work along the way, but I’m thinking it might just be too hard to do it all in the month I have left til we get going again.

So I think I’ll do as much as I can now, and get as far as I can in the books and supplemental activities and such….but try not to kill myself gathering all that I need. If I can just get some good links and plan to research more as we go, I may be able to just keep things interesting and tweak as we go as needed. Perhaps I can plan each month for the next month and just keep a bit ahead of the game. This will be a major challenge for me, since I’m so distractable. But I will keep on keepin on and see if I can make it work for us.

One thing I really want to make sure to make use of this year is the teacher’s library I get access to through Eleanor Roosevelt (our homeschool charter school), and especially the Discovery Education website that we get  a membership to from ERCLC as well. There’s so many awesome things in both of those that I really need to take the time to use!

Lots to do! Time to go back to planning! I’m still adding info as I go to the 2012/13 School Year Pages, and I’ve created a shelf on Goodreads, to keep track of the books I want to make sure to look into using that I’ve found recommended on the web in various places. I’ve also created a spreadsheet to log all the things I want to possibly use….still trying to decide which works better for me, Goodreads or Google doc. More to come! Lots to think about and research!