Planning a Rainbow

When Gareth was younger, one of his favorite books was Planting a Rainbow, by Lois Ehlert.  Sunday night, after I nursed Chipmunk to sleep, I got out my multi-colored Sharpies and some printer paper so I could plan a rainbow.

Some time around the beginning of June, I realized that I was going to have three official "students" this year, and that, not next year, but the year after, I would suddenly have five official students.  (I'm not sure the steep learning curve of twins ever really levels out.  Whenever there's a new stage, it's always going to be two more and not just one more.  Two to potty train, two for kindergarten, two to teach to read, two to go through that difficult nine year old year with, two to become teenagers at the same time, two to teach to drive at the same time... Mothers of triplets are laughing at me. ;-)

Anyway, I had been feeling for some time that my freewheeling planning style was probably not going to work for much longer, and that I needed a bit more of a guide to get me through the year.  I do have to produce plans for the school district every year, and I try to make them pretty vague (without making them useless), but at the end of the year, I'm always looking at those IHIPs and thinking, "I said we were going to do what???" and laughing.  The school district hasn't seemed to mind yet (and my kids have excellent standardized test scores), but still -- it makes me nervous.

So I set about to learn how to plan.  It was like my own unit study.  I looked at all sorts of styles, printed out blog posts and charts, asked questions on 4Real, downloaded the Simply Charlotte Mason planning e-book... read through many of my favorite homeschooling books again... and...

Got really muddled. 

It does not help that this time of year is so busy.  On Saturday, over lunch at Arby's, Andy and I talked about how we were both feeling that it was all too much.  Now, the rest of the homeschooling world is breaking and decluttering their homes like mad in preparation for the new school year.  They are planning up a storm.  I was trying to do all that, too.  But -- there are also chickens in our laundry room, a huge garden to tend, food to put up, soccer three nights a week (taking up nearly five hours, total, each time), allergies, a baby who doesn't sleep, and kids who need CONSTANT INPUT to factor into my equation.

"Summer and the living is easy"???  Don't make me laugh.

It's TOO MUCH.

So.  Andy and I decided that next year we would try to do a better job working all of this by OUR schedule.  Decluttering the house is best saved for fall or early spring.  Planning needs to be spread out over the year more, although we're still pretty dependent on the school's year: our end of year report is due in June, and IHIPs in August.  I can't do anything about that.  Hopefully next year we'll be able to do more school in May and June (which we didn't this year because of doctor's appointments) and then we'll be able to take July completely off, to just focus on the extracurricular. 

As it stands, I am planning to take some time off in late August/early September.  I am hoping to focus on the harvest then.  (Which means, of course, that the house is going to fall apart.  I can't seem to focus on more than one thing at a time.  And actually, considering the amount of sleep or time off I am not getting on a regular basis, it's a wonder I can focus on anything at all.)

The TOO MUCH doesn't mean that planning is a bad thing, although it does mean that there are no large chunks of time in which to do it.  I really need a throughline to grab onto when I get off track.  But first I needed to sort myself out of the muddle.

Enter the rainbow Sharpies.

                                                                                             

I am just going to say now: rainbow Sharpies make me happy.  Lo, these many years ago, back when I used to write fantasy fiction, I would write rough drafts of short stories using rainbow Sharpies.  I also used Crayola Washable Markers.  Either way, it helped to remind me that I was just writing a rough draft.

Anyway, this time the purpose of the rainbow Sharpies was to help me sort my homeschooling philosophy out of the pile.  As you can see, I made four columns for the four different philosophies I thought were most useful.  (You will note that I included Waldorf as one of the columns.  I don't really consider our homeschooling as Waldorf-inspired, but I have been reading up on Waldorf education for the past year -- first, because I didn't know anything about it, and I really can't stand that; and secondly, because when Waldorf first began floating across my radar, I had already decided that art and creativity were absolutely necessary to any learning in our house.  Waldorf seemed to place a heavy emphasis on art, so I started reading.  I've borrowed some good resources, found that main lesson books are really useful, looked at ways art can be included in every subject, and am thinking about ways to include story in the teaching of math, but that's about as far as it goes.) 

I then wrote down what I had taken or thought I could take from each.  After I listed everything I could think of, I made a list of what to me formed the basis of learning in my house.  Which would be living books, freedom within limits, art, and nature.  These must all be present in order for us to be happy.  Without any one of them, learning is subpar at best. 

Then I worked on a family list of subjects, color coded again as to philosophical origin (sort of -- obviously Math does not "belong" to Montessori, but math is one area in which we use a lot of Montessori materials), with topics underneath.

I took the topics and wrote down which were themes for Choice Time, to help me decide on choices:

If it looks like a lot, remember it's for Choice time, which means that the kids will not be required to hit every one of these areas every week.  I went ahead and put in the Math Gnomes from Serendipity, but I'm not sure we're going to use them; I may write my own stories, involving knights or pirates or animals, or we may just use living math books.  Either way, I want Farmerboy to have fun this year.  He's heard his older brother complain about math so much, he's already started moaning and groaning about schoolwork.  (He's never actually done any.)

I did think a bit about kindergarten, too:

(Kindergarten looks impressive, but the History/Lit and Nature Study boxes are totally informal and stuff we would do anyway, regardless of whether Farmerboy was "official" or not.  I put out book baskets, and he chooses the books.  Katydid reads many of them to him, and his younger brothers often listen in as well.)

And now I feel a bit more centered.  I actually have most of our core resources for Gareth and Katydid already; I just need to go through them so I can be familiar with them.  It's kindergarten -- if you can believe it -- that's my stumbling block so far, mainly because I don't think I did a terrifically good job of kindergarten with my older two and because it's been four years since Katydid was that age.

Okay, next up: I did promise Erin that I would show her what I put in my file folders.  I was just proud of my rainbow Sharpie flow charts. :-)

Comments

[Monique]

Wow! Those are cool and very helpful to me as I learn about all this planning. Love the colored sharpies! I may have to put mine to good use as well.

[Meredith]

Love your planning rainbow :)

[Milehimama]

This post is awesome! I'm going to try this. We do "traditional Catholic Classical Masontorri" around here, and I have trouble remembering which parts of which philosophies I really want to emphasize. I don't know much about Waldorf, but I think I will have to learn as a large part of our "Catholic" comes from books like "Catholic Traditions in Crafts", etc.

It's interesting that you rely so heavily on Montessori math - I'm the opposite! I find the stamp game, golden beads, bank game, etc. so intimidating that we do Montessori for the youngers, for catechesis, for science but NOT for math!

I'd love to hear what math looks like in your house.

[Wendy]

I need to get some planning done myself. My twins officially start kindergarten this year. I'll have 5 students ranging from K-7th grade. Ack! What have I gotten myself into?

[Vicki]

Great planning ideas!