Lesson Plans Complete

Today I spent the afternoon at Border's, planning the next six weeks or so of Rachel's lessons. Julia's I did a couple of weeks ago, but when I ran out of time I planned just one week for Rachel, and then last week was vacation, since Matt was out of town. I realized too late that I am also out of plan for Ben (for some reason I thought I did his at the same time as Julia's) but that isn't a big deal--Kindergarten is so easy to plan that I can write a week's worth of lessons down while he does tomorrow's work.

Anyway, I'm feeling good about life, because in the next six weeks Rachel will finish her math and another of her Language Arts sections (she has already finished three other programs; grammar, research paper and reading comprehension texts) which leaves her with just two: her literature program and another called "Figuratively Speaking," which teaches literary concepts in each chapter with examples from literature and activities to reinforce the concept. The literature program is one we love, where she reads different Newbery classics and does various activities--essays, journals, vocabulary lists, art projects, etc. We have been taking this one slowly, allowing two weeks for each book, since she had so many other things to do. So we will continue with this program next year, and I don't have to worry about getting it finished before we end the school year.

She will continue with art, music and science--I got a cool program on CD Rom for all three of those, and can use those next year as well. I also picked up a science test prep book which we'll use for reviewing concepts. She'll continue with American History, which may or may not be finished at the end of the year. We recently discovered that our library has Rosetta Stone French online for free (this program costs somewhere around $500, so I am ecstatic to have found it) and so we have replaced our blah and boring workbooks with that. She also has a weekly discussion with Matt on a chapter from these books he found: "Becoming a Problem-Solving Genius," and "10 Things every Future Mathemetician and Scientist Must Know." They use cartoons and very user-friendly text to illustrate some very adult science, math and logic concepts--Matt says he would have been so happy to have seen those books as a kid. So they read and talk about it and do some problems from the book every week.

I am also happy to note that I caught up on correcting her work--with everything I have to do every day that was something that had gotten away from me rather badly...it's nice to have that nagging chore finished. And so, the light at the end of this year's school tunnel is in sight! I will only have to plan one more section of lessons and we will be in summer vacation!!

--Jen