Jul 28 2010
Scheduling and preparing for a new school year
I posted this message on the MODGFamilies yahoo list, but thought I’d share it with you. I have a fairly large family and trying to get time with each child is difficult. You can take what you think is useful and disregard the rest.
I have a schedule that my consultant helped me to create so that I have time to get to each child – it’s only 30 minutes per child (I have 7 I’m schooling – 2 10th, 1 8th, 1 6th, 1 4th, 1 1st and 1 k along w/ 2 more little ones). She suggested that I have each older child take a turn at taking care of the little ones. I know that there will be more time in the day, but this gives me a meeting time – face to face time – with each child. Of course I will be there answering questions as the day progresses.
I plan for each older child to do some of the drill work, 30 minutes with a younger sibling, and then the older child will later have another 30 minute period where they play with the little ones. I am making a list of what activities they need to drill the younger student on, but it includes Latin vocabulary, Baltimore Catechism questions, Writing Road to Reading phonograms, poetry, and math drills. My thoughts behind it are that some of my older ones were not exposed to this memory work, so they get a chance to soak a bit of it up.
The activities for the little ones include taking them outside to play, playing a game, doing a craft, doing a ziplock bag activity, painting, play dough, puzzles, peg board, mosaic board, coloring, and reading books. Please feel free to post in the comments additional activities to keep the little ones busy and happy.
On Sundays, I’m going to gather the activities that the older child can pick from to do with the little ones. My consultant said that it is critical that I get everyone to help because I have 3 kids with dyslexic tendencies – one of which I need to teach to read, as well as two who have speech impediment issues. I have great programs to address these issues, I just need time to work with them.
Additionally, on their schedules I assigned someone to make lunch and someone else to clean up. And, I have a period after lunch for “zone cleaning”. I made up a zone cleaning sheet that has 5 things to do in each room each day, and then 10 things to do in the room once a week. When I print out their weekly assignments, I will include the daily zone and bedroom clean up. A child will have the zone to take are of for a week, and then he rotates to the next zone.
I also just finished all the copying that we will need for the year so that things will go smoother (no bottlenecks like a printer that’s down! – ask me how many times that happened last year). I also made copies for myself of all the poems and memory work so I have it in one place. Copies included quizzes, maps, Latin drill forms, and poetry.
I created a folder for each child that contains most of what we’ll do for our 30 minutes of family school – daily Bible readings, religious song (we are going to use Alan Jemison’s 36 Traditional Roman Catholic Hymns), Pledge of Allegiance, patriotic song, art study, music, Baltimore Catechism questions and answers from Gutenburg.org, Latin prayers, states and capitals (we all need to learn them), Friendly Defender cards and Memorize the Faith! 
I know I’m going to fail many times – but, my hope is that each day is a new start, so if the schedule goes out the window, I can start fresh the next day. We’ll see how much tweaking I have to do, but it took me nearly the entire summer trying to figure this out. I finally just had to sit down and do it since it had worried me so much.
Here is a copy of my schedule in a .doc format so you can edit it: 2010 Schedule
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