2011 Plans, Preparing and Organizing

[Aeress]

Hi Guys and Gals,

 How was the your Fall 2010? Any plans for Winter/Spring 2011?

Are you taking a break this week? If so, are you cleaning and preparing for when you go back to "school"?

Anyone organizing their space and re-arranging?

Jan 2011 for us will wrap up our study of the Civil War (for now) and our space/planets study. We will move onto the science of snow, and the industrial age. We have followed a rough time line for social studies/science, so we are almost to modern times. We tend towards a Montessori approach but we got away from it right before the holidays, though the younger kiddo learns through Montessori. I am decluttering/cleaning and organizing our space but probably won't rearrange the space as it works well the way it is.

I like these breaks to let myself and the girls really relax and spend time being lazy. :) No classes, no schedule, no running around- it is so relaxed.

How about you?

[Ravin]

Trying to figure out where to fit a desk for DD. She's getting her own computer. Other than that, not much. We'll just be picking up where we left off once the Great Distractors (aka her neighborhood playmates) are back in school.

[elizawill]

we took last week & this week off.  we'll start back on monday.  no changes really...just picking up where we left off.  our co-op starts back in january too, so we always look forward to that.  in the spring, we'll get some chicken eggs through 4H...that's something we do each year and it's really fun.  we'll also do something special for lent, have more outside field trips, etc.  the winter here is cold (well, we're in SC...but it's cold to me!, lol)....so spring fever hits us hard. 

i'm also planning for next year currently.  i'm about through with our final decisions & will purchase everything with our tax return.  that's about it.

[Momma Aimee]

changes here -- but i am not 100% sure and they will be slow.

Little Brother (3) is going to start 2 hours on Mondays at the pre-school classroom to get more communication and Speech time on his IEP (working one on one and one on 2 with a typical peer) so that is 2 hours a week for Big Brother (5) and I to work alone ...

[phathui5]

No break for us this week.

One change is that I ordered Saxon Math 6/5 for my ten year old ds. He finished CLE Math 4 a couple of weeks ago and I was hoping that Saxon would be more challenging. So far, it's been really easy for him, but people have told me that the beginning lessons are a lot of review.

We will be taking a break from swim lessons this winter. The older three kids did swim lessons at the Y for all of 2010 and I'm ready to take a break from having somewhere to be every Thursday night and Saturday morning.

[AAK]

We take a winter break (last week and this week).  With family in town and all the holiday excitement, we wouldn't get anything done anyways  Also, I traditionally use the week between Christmas and New Years to "conquer the clutter".  I cleaned out my closet yesterday (yikes) and the bathroom drawers today.  Tomorrow will be the piles of paperwork!

I feel that I am not doing justice for my oldest with science.  So, we are going to have a Science intensive this January.  I will let some other subjects slide a bit so that we can really focus on having fun with science.  Other than that, I like most of what we started with.  I hate what I bough for lang. arts for my second grader but we dropped that back in October, and now I only use the index to make sure I cover it all.  My 2nd grader will start cursive in Jan.  I also hope that they get in a slightly better morning routine!  I hope that I get better at taking care of weekly planning on Sundays.  

Amy

[inky leeuhhh]

i don't think much will change for us in jan. we'll hopefully get to working on our timeline (we're up to ancient egypt so have a little back tracking to do), and i'd like to declutter the school area, but i have no idea what to do with it. there may be a trip to ikea in our near future.

[Starflower]

We've always been really unschooly so the only breaks we've taken have been while classes or activities are on break. I just got Math U See in the mail a couple weeks ago and decided to start after we returned from a trip. Now we're back so I thought I'd start next week when DD's nature class resumes, but she's been frustrated in the past few days about not getting placement value when trying to read numbers in books, etc. (She reads at a very high level, but math confuses her.) So I think I'm going to start with her tomorrow while she is still very open to wanting to start working on math. (I've been "priming" her by talking about it for a few weeks now.) Eventually we'll get into a groove. I am a little nervous about using a curriculum because everything else seems to come along so organically, but DD thinks she is bad at math and it's not my strong suit, so we're going to try it.

We also want to start having Family Meetings every week to plan our week - not just homeschool stuff, but everything, just so we can get our lives a bit more organized.

[ocelotmom]

We keep going with the basics (reading, math, handwriting) through the "break", with the exception of a few days right around Christmas, because they do better with that as a continuous thing, and it really doesn't take much time (I plan to do the same thing through most or summer). We're also continuing with some history supplemental read-alouds from the past few weeks, which I don't think they really see as "school", anyways :). I have a break from everything else scheduled, though. 

I'm debating whether or not we want to stick with Math Mammoth after 2A (which we'll finish up in the next 1-2 months if we stay consistent). I really want to like it, but I feel like the teaching methods confuse DS and that we're kind of spinning our wheels - he could do all the math we're doing now last year, just not in the Math Mammoth way. I want him to have the deeper understanding that MM provides rather than just knowing how to do the problem, but I'm not sure if he's developing that. 

No clue what we'd replace it with, though.

Beyond that, we're doing ok as we are now.

[Greenmama2]

Pondering a few changes here. Nothing concrete yet although I did just order a few books from Amazon.

[kittie313]

Fall was just BAD for us.  We started off good, and then quickly bogged down with the pace of the curriculum we were using on top of all my volunteer work and my college classes.  I cut back the piles of volunteering so that now I'm just doing Awana (I'm the Puggles leader), and we cut back on schooling by withdrawing from the k12 school and going off on our own with Sonlight.  I can't get us into a really workable routine, my college classes are bogging me down right now with the amount of work (and it seems like all of it this class is related to an English foundation I never got in public school so I'm having a lot of trouble with identifying different genres, literary components, and analyzing biblical passages by identifying genre and literary components as part of the analysis), and well at the moment it looks like a toy store exploded in my house thanks to Christmas. lol  I'm planning this week to get things back under control the best I can, and this weekend force dh and the kids to help with that as well, and then also figure out a new way to schedule our homeschool stuff because how I've got it going now just isn't working for us.

I'm really hoping that January 2011 brings us some positive changes so that I can enjoy things more with my girls.  We are just in an odd place here, and I don't like how it feels.  Something's gotta give around here.............. and its gonna give fast once I figure out the issues.

[mary3mama]

Cool thread. I like 'peeking' in on other families. :D

We're fully unschool-oriented around here...so it is business as usual (and we love it.) 

Our family got a Wii system for Christmas...so if there's a change here it is because of that. So. Much. Fun. My muscles hurt from playing Wii sports with the kids. Loving it!

After trying so many homeschooling paths (unsuccessfully I should add) finally settling into and enjoying a more radical unschooling approach has been totally awesome!

[kgianforti]

We are going to start BJU Math on Monday as well as Horizons 2 Math. We are also going to start an American History study using Sonlight materials and other resources/projects I have gathered. When we complete Sonlight Science K in February, we are going to "detour" to Noeo Chemistry I for a while! Lots of exciting stuff coming up here!

[frugalmama]

We're getting back to lessons - we did lessons for 2 weeks in the fall then switched to unschooling with emphasis on phonics and reading to build DD's skills. Now she's asking for lessons again.

[LeighB]

Some changes here.  We will really be focusing on finding a rhythm that works for us, with my Dhs work schedule.  We will be moving most of our real school time to the weekends, and a few hours in the evening.  Our days are going to be more free...crafts, books, games, worksheets when asked for, that sort of thing.