new year, new organizational method

For the past 4 years we have been enrolled in Seton, but have not really utilized the lesson plans. After my student teaching days of frantically trying to write lesson plans from scratch on the weekends perhaps I felt that being sent instructions for each day was cheating. I religiously rewrote all the assignments in planning books and checked off each assignment. This job alone took hours of precious time, but I felt it was important that I had a book in hand if some "authority" ever came to the door. This year however, Will's 4th grade assignments were more than "do pages 45-46" so I had to come up with a better system. Of course I realized this after I had spent upteen dollars buying rubber stamps for the planners.

I think the system I have come up with (actually many other Seton moms have recommended this, but I felt like I had to reinvent the wheel) is to have a small 1.5" binder for each child. The big kid's binders contains an attendance record and the lesson plans for the current quarter. The pocket in the front is for finished work and tests that need to be completed that week and the one in the back is for me to organize the quarter's packet to send in to Seton. Each day's work is highlighted in the lesson plans and then scratched out with a marker as we complete it. All the rest of the material: lesson plans for the rest of the year, progress sheets, tests... are all in huge binders on the shelf. Maggie is also affected by this sudden disregard for planning books, I haven't checked off an assignment or kept attendance. She is happily doing as many pages as I will let her and not being officially old enough for Kindergarten I am willing to let it take as long as necessary to get through the books. We certainly don't seem to be as overwhelmed by the volume of paper and work that needs to be accomplished by June and I haven't lost anything yet!

This method seems to keep everything accessible and is much more workable than rewriting all the lessons in the planner. It also seems to be less likely to result in a lost folder than the every subject in a separate folder method. It only took me 5 years to get to this point of not having to do everything they way they taught me in grad school. Maybe by the time the kids are teens I will progress all the way to unschooling, but I doubt it.

Moral of the story: learn from other's experience and strive to make mom's work easier. Both will lead to less hassle and more time to teach and play after the schoolwork is finished.