Planning for school

Since we are back to school, I thought I would share with you how I plan for school. When I get a new curriculum, I log every lesson into a spreadsheet. Each book/subject gets it's own page. Then as I start to plan for the year, I make a new spreadsheet for the school year. Then I copy each subject I plan to use for the year into it.

This year, Hubby had me put all the info into one big sheet. You can see part of that sheet above.

He imported it into OpenOffice's dBase program. He set it all up into a table called Lessons.

I can go into the table and change the week number if we get behind & don't get a certain lesson done.

He then set up a couple reports for me. The supplies report is supposed to print out any supplies we need for the week, but it it's not working quite right yet.

When I click on the Lessons report, it asks me what week I want. We are on week 4 so I enter "4".

It then pulls up all entries for week 4 by student! It page breaks at the end of each students work. I now have 2-3 pages for each student once I print them out.

I then have 4 binders. In 1, I put a copy of all 3 kids printouts. Then I set up the other 3 for each kid.

Each Monday (or Sunday if I'm actually organized) I print out the assignments. In the front I put the week's assignments for that kid. Then I have a tab for each subject. All printouts for that subject go behind the tab.

Now I just sit back & let the kids take over. They decide what they tackle when. I'm there to help & guide, but I'm letting them be more "in charge" of their schooling. They just have to get their school work done by Friday night. So far, they've been done with almost everything by Thursday afternoon! But then we are only on week 4 of school.

So that's how I planned for this year. Thanks to Hubby, printing the weekly lesson plans is way easier than the way I used to do it (cut & paste cells then print!)!

How do you plan? I'd love to hear from you!

Posted with Blogsy