We are now beginning our tenth year of home schooling. I’ve got things running pretty smoothly at this point but it’s taken us quite awhile to get here. We have tried so many different ways of doing things and none of them have worked very well. But the way we do it now is pretty fool-proof and I’m loving it.
At first, I did try to plan the entire year out. I would go through an entire book and break it down into daily lessons and assign each lesson to a date in my lesson planner. Then I’d get the next book out and go back to the beginning of the planner and do the same thing. When I was done, I had every subject planned out to be broken into what to do each day. The trouble was, I had assigned those lessons to dates. And I had assigned how much had to be done in a given day. So even if we could keep up on math, we might fall behind three days in science and a week in history.
As you can imagine, this was a disaster. I had decided in August exactly what we were going to do on May 10 of the following year! What a mess. By the end of September we were, inevitably, “behind” and drowning because we had to “catch up”. But we were catching up to self-imposed deadlines that didn’t even matter! And I was making myself SICK over it.