Reviewing and Planning

Here I am again, blogging on Saturday morning. I've realized that I've made a lot of promises to myself this year. More than is probably good for me but I'm plodding along. I find in teaching and in life it is good to review the past and use that information to help plan for the future. I try not to have too many regrets or to allow myself to have negative feelings about things I think I've done poorly or wrongly. Instead I choose to look closely at what happened and try to figure out why and how to change for the future. Certainly there are many things I wish I could go back and redo and change but since I don't have a time machine I can't do that and obsessing on the past will do nothing to help my future.

So in looking at the week in review I'll use that information to plan for the upcoming week. 

1. Food and exercise. I've done a good job keeping to my food goals this week. I didn't get to the gym too much but I did go twice which is more than I can say for the last few months. I gave up coffee for 5 days. I have had a lot of trouble with my sleep for some reason (waking in the middle of the night and not being able to go back to sleep) so I'm feeling totally exhausted in the morning. Today I decided that it wasn't the right time to forgo coffee. I'm on my second cup and it's soooooooo delicious! The key here is to not allow this one broken resolution to be a slippery slope into breaking the others.

2. Drawing. I haven't sat down to draw since last weekend. I need to find a little time this weekend and at least once or twice a week to draw. I'm still adjusting to my new schedule and I've tweaked my cooking schedule starting this week so I haven't gotten in a groove yet. Hopefully I can spend a little time in between jobs working on this goal. 

3. Meal Planning. I made a rough plan of dinners for the month. This was very helpful. I need to review the plan, look at the recipes and shop for what I need. Mike and I are going to take a trip to a local grocery store that I discovered sells grass fed beef from a local farm. I'm always on the lookout for places to purchase grass fed food and to see how the prices compare. 

4. Quilting. Yes.....Mike's cousin (who is MUCH younger than he is) is having her first baby and so I will make a baby quilt for her. After a lot of time not wanting to sew, I've been feeling the desire again lately. I'm not sure why. So I've picked a pattern and need to go to the fabric store to pick up the supplies. The shower is in February so I have a little time to work on it.

5. School. I don't really have too much to worry about this weekend for school. I've organized the room so that I don't have to change out the shelves too often. I do need to continue working on some lessons but they aren't pressing. I'm working on academics with the children individually or in small groups to try to get them acclimated to being more independent with their work. Unfortunately, the play areas pull them in large groups and make the classroom very loud. There isn't anything I can really do about this so I'm just trying to separate children who are misbehaving and are having trouble concentrating. That has been helping. I have to remember that it may take awhile to accomplish.

6. Reading. I've been working slowly through 'Positive Discipline for Preschoolers' which is a very good book. I'm just reading a chapter a day or so. I've also picked up 'My life in France' by Julia Child. The book chronicles her life with her husband while they lived in France which is also where she learned to cook. It is very interesting. I've got so many books that I'd like to read but I often fall asleep while reading so it's difficult to read too much at once!

7. Connecting. I've been feeling very disconnected from other people lately. I used to feel so connected at church but have really lost most of the friends I had as a younger mother. It really makes me quite sad. The only place where I have people saying they miss me is in the choir. I'm thinking that perhaps I should rejoin to see if that makes me feel more involved. I'm also thinking about taking a yoga class. I've been having a lot of trouble with my back and I think that Yoga might help with it as well as be an exercise I enjoy more than weight training or using the tread mill. It might also be a place to meet new people. The two issues are money and time with that one so I'm just exploring options. I'm also meeting a friend this morning for coffee. She's been the one consistent friend in my life and I'm glad we can connect every few months.

Well....that's a lot! Luckily I have off school on Monday. It gives me a little more time to organize myself and check off a few things from the list. I guess I'd better get cracking....it's almost 8 a.m.

The Great Salad Experiment

A black radish. At market it looked like a basket full of coal.

The insides are white. It's a spicy treat.

In June I'll be traveling to Philadelphia every day for 7 weeks. It's going to be an intense time and I know I'll be exhausted. I want to try to take a healthy lunch and I'm a big salad eater over the summer when it is hot and the veggies are fresh and local. I wondered if the salad would stay fresh if prepared all at once for the week. So today I started the grand experiment after returning home from market. My salads have 2 kinds of lettuce, carrot, black radish, breakfast radish, mushroom, red pepper, avocado, tomato, bacon and feta cheese. I also make my own salad dressing. It's usually a conglomeration of items I find around the kitchen: olive oil, lemon juice, herbs, onions, peppers, etc. I haven't had a bad batch yet.

Home Learning Organization, Part II

I have to admit that I still feel a little silly about these organization posts. However, since I started I guess I should finish. In the last post I showed you the folder we use to store our papers from day to day. Today I'll show you the other notebooks I use with the kids. In a beautiful, perfect world, every Friday the boys get out their large three ring binder and organize their work by subject and in chronological order. Since our house doesn't exist in that beautiful, perfect world but in some much less perfect place, we get to this about every two or three weeks. It sure goes faster if they do it every week so we'll keep aiming for this. I find that having this kind of a binder really helps when we are making their portfolios at the end of the year. We know just where everything is and it is easy to pick out the work we want. I have a terrible memory so organization is my friend.The other notebooks are for specific subjects. We are using the Institute for Excellence in Writing this year and the Student Writing Intensive includes a notebook. Since we borrowed the program from a friend, I made up our own notebooks so it would be easier to follow along with the DVD's. We store all our writing in this notebook and don't transfer it into the larger binder.
I also made the boys a science notebook. This is just a small folder with pockets and three tabs for papers. To be honest, this actually helps me more than them. I loosely use the science recommendations in The Well Trained Mind. So this year we are covering earth science and astronomy using How the Earth Works and How the Universe Works. TWTM recommends reading a topic, doing an experiment, answering questions using the scientific method, illustrating the topic and writing a one page report each week. To be honest, the experiments in How the Earth Works are often either too simple or require too many materials. We were reading, drawing and writing and science was becoming a real chore for the boys. So I decided to change things up to make science more fun and exciting. I took the geology unit, decided what topics we would study, ordered some supplies and created a notebook for the experiments we would be completing. My lesson plans are in my black notebook and the pages they need each day are in order in their little notebooks. (Below is a picture of step one of our limestone caves experiment). This week is the end of our study of geology and we will be moving on to Weather. So, I need to sit down and write up some lesson plans. We will make a cover sheet for our Geology study and move all those papers into the big binder at the end of this week. So our science binder will be refreshed with sheets pertaining to the study of weather.

If I have to pick the thing that helps me stay organized and on task, I'd have to say my weekend and long term planning. The notebooks help keep the paper under control but really it is taking the time to make a plan that helps the most. This year we are doing several lessons that are about 6 weeks each. In science I planned for a block of geology, weather and astronomy and in social studies we are working our way through the southern hemisphere continents. For each of these units, when I took the time to plan out the whole thing (always having room for modifications) the unit went much smoother and we covered more material than when I planned day to day. Even when we modified school to be with Mike's Dad in his last days, this planning paid off. The boys didn't do quite as much geology as we had originally planned, but we still got a whole lot accomplished. I don't think that would have happened if I hadn't planned ahead. As you can see by my plan in the above picture, it isn't complicated! Really it's just deciding what topics to cover, where we can find the information and what experiments to accomplish. I then created pages for the boys that complemented the day's study. So some of their pages included answering questions according to the scientific method, filling in a table, illustrating and labeling, etc. Keep it simple but organized is my mantra.

Wow! What a long post. I apologize to those three readers out there. I don't know if that was at all helpful to anyone or not. My system may seem a bit anal to some but it works for us. And now, on this snowy Sunday morning (the boys served at Mass last night), I'm off to plan our weather unit!

Home Learning Organization part 1

I was recently reading about Dawn's organizational system and thought to myself, "Self, do you think anyone cared how YOU organize your homeschool?" Since I received one comment that was positive about blogging such an issue here it is.

Let me preface this post by saying that blogs seem to make life look easy, effortless and mostly perfect. Lord knows that isn't the case around our house. So, I'm showing you what I do, what works for me and my crew, in case some part of it will work for you.

Another thought before I start.....as many of you know our oldest is autistic. If there's one thing that we've learned about autism in our household, it's that when we are organized and have everything planned and noted, life goes much smoother. Anxiety levels are down and work gets accomplished. Needless to say my "system" has in great part stemmed from the needs of Nathan and my own need to "know what's happening."

To begin, lets talk about colors. Both my boys are fanatical about their favorite colors. Nathan's is blue, Nolan's is red. EVERYTHING they own is their favorite color. Needless to say, it can be annoying at times but it works out well in my organizational system.

As you can see, each boy has several notebooks in his favorite color. I'm going to talk today about the folder we use every day. This folder (it's just a simple two pocket folder) holds all the papers needed for the week, their weekly schedule and all the finished papers for the week. I don't require them to put anything in order at this point. Nathan probably tends to keep things in order a bit more than Nolan but, to be honest, I don't really look at these folders other than to put papers inside them over the weekend.
Included is a picture of the weekly schedule that I print out for both boys. This week's looks a little thin because we have a field trip and a homeschool group activity. I keep the instructions to a minimum in the schedule because I often change my mind about exactly what we are learning OR I have given the boys a long term project that they can finish as they wish. I'm trying to work on more independence in their school work and responsibility this year. It is slow in coming but I can see progress.

Last for this post is my notebook. I really don't use it very much but I do keep a three ring binder with my lesson plans (I usually do my plans on the computer and just print them out), ideas and field trip info thrown into a folder in the back. Once you see what I have in some of the boys other folders, you'll see why I don't really use this folder a whole lot. I do like having everything in one spot so I can find what I need quickly. In the next post I'll share what we do with all those papers that accumulate.