Organization; or, Death by Papercuts

The school year is fast approaching and the Back to School sales have begun. What am I buying? Crates and hanging files and index card holders and paper clips. I'm getting organized. The curriculum is purchased and now I need to get it ready to place before my lab rat -er- daughter come September 1st. (was originally going to be August 1st, but we now have travel plans for mid-August, and I think it'll be easier to just follow the public school calender anyway).

I've been inspired by a thread over at The Well Trained Mind discussion forums to do a file system for our school year. Our entire school year is going to be in a box! (well, almost, but close enough!) I have 36 hanging files in a large crate, one for each week of the school year, and so far I have a weeks worth of math, history, and handwriting worksheets tucked inside, pulled page by page from their pristine binding. I was amazed I was able to do it because I *hate* messing up books! I can't even crack the spine of a book without feeling a sense of loss for the loss of it's beauty). Science will be added as soon as I can get the binding cut off of the student workbook (WHY oh WHY didn't the publisher perforate the pages? It's a WORKBOOK! and perforate is a word, right?) The not-worksheet-needing subjects, such as reading, will not be tucked in, since they're self-contained in text books, but each folder *is* going to have a Lesson Plan page that will list off the chapters to do out of those books that week, as well as what support materials I'll need. I'll also include a list of support materials to collect for the *next* week in each folder, so that I can start preparing for that. (things such as supplies for hands-on projects, library books, etc.) Sunday night the weekly work will be placed into Raia's school binder, and she'll work her way through it and when she's done it'll go into her completed work binder for our records. The lesson plan page will go into MY binder, and I'll know what's on deck for the week.

Now, I don't expect Raia to finish off each week's work successfully each week, but it's my goal and my hope that she'll be able to get most of it. The only subject in those folders that I'm really worried about her grasping each week is math. If that takes longer then I'll just bump the work back to the next folder, and so on (which is why the lesson plans pages will be written in pencil ;) ). But hopefully this will help us keep on track with getting the work done in 36 weeks (i.e. 180 days). I LOVE the idea of having a large chunk of the prep-work already done at the beginning of the school year. I think having that basic step already done will help be have more time to do the "fun" homeschooling stuff I hope to do, like special field trips and extra-curricular stuff.

Some cool ideas I've had pop into my head this week as I've been getting the folders ready:

* Scripture Memory versus. I bought some small index cards and some printer-friendly shipping labels that I'm going to print off the scriptures for this year's and next year's Primary theme onto and stick them on the index cards (to save me the writing. I'm such a product of the Technology Age :op) and have Raia memorize one a week (so 24 versus and Articles of Faith)

* I'm going to create her her own play list on my Zune (MP3 player) that will have whatever poem she's memorizing that week (from the audio CD that came with our grammar curriculum), a Primary song or two (again, the ones that go with the years' theme), a piece of classical music, and maybe an audio book, and she can listen to those during free time. And I can change it up whenever I need/want to.

I'm in such a different place now than I was a year ago. I remember wondering if I should have Raia do Kindergarten at the public school or start homeschooling right away, and I'm SO glad we let her go to Kindergarten. Even though the year wasn't as wonderful academically as I'd hoped, she still had fun, and I had a full year to prepare for this. As much as I wish she'd been able to grow more in her Kindergarten year, I do not think she would have grown as much, or any better, if she'd been here at home, because I was just TOO NEW to the whole homeschooling mindset. I didn't have any direction or firm ideas on what I wanted our homeschooling journey to look like. Now I know what I hope to accomplish. I know that I can do this. I know that even if I don't do the most stellar job, I can still do an adequate job, and that that's not much different from what most public schools can claim.

I am a full-blown homeschooling mom. :)