The Homeschool Memoirs theme for this past week is "Homeschool Agendas". We were asked to share our 2008-09 School Plan. I've been avoiding doing this one because, to be perfectly honest, we're still working on our plan, and we probably will be for quite some time. In the past I have started the school year with plans all laid out for the whole year and then been terribly frustrated when they haven't unfolded as I planned, so I have become much more relaxed - maybe too relaxed.
The past few weeks I have been trying to make a conscious effort to jot down possibilities for the coming year. I only have one formal student this year - DD#1, who is almost 16 and if she were in school would be going into grade 11. For the past couple of years I have been encouraging her to become more involved in the planning process because it is her education and I think it is important that she own it. I am here to mentor her and help in any way I can but it's no good for me to come up with all kinds of plans without her input. We've done that in the past and it just doesn't work. We've been discussing this off and on this month and we will be getting much more serious about it in the coming week. We have a general plan of sort that we will be using to guide us to make a more concrete plan.
My plan is that we will be sitting down this coming week and writing out some goals for the year, looking at what subjects we need to cover, what subjects we want to cover, what texts and resources are available and appealing, and discussing how to reach our goals. I'd like us to break down the big goals into monthly and weekly goals and have regular meetings at the beginning of each week to plan for the coming week and at the end of each week to evaluate how we did and what needs to happen next.
We take advantage of a whole lot of resources but we are not slaves to any of them. We have Saxon Math, but we also use lots of online sites. We have an Apologia Science, but we also use online sites and the library. The library has always been our main source for language arts, and it will continue to be so, along with many online sites and old texts that I have on hand.
DD has a great interest in music and has taken voice lessons and taught herself to play guitar and is working on piano and violin. She will continue with this and I'm also hoping to interest her in some music history.
History is not something we've done much with but it's something I hope to do more of this year. I'm hoping to integrate it into the other subjects as much as possible.
Current events have also aways played an important part in our schooling. Watching the news and reading the paper and discussing the happenings are a given. We often use these as jumps of points for further study.
So, as you can see, I have a lot of ideas, but no definite plans in place yet. We will take it one day at a time.
A verse that is important to me in this area is "Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Psalm 90:12
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