Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Our HS Series: Babs, The Binder System



Meet Babs, (aka "Big Ass Binder System) hence "BABS" in polite company ;)

She is the frame work behind our school. Shes my Personal Assistant, she's everything. Without her, the sky would fall, and Chicken Little would be screaming her (him? it?) little head off.

Although we have moved on a little from her, we still use her, she's just more "streamlined" (more about that in a later post)

We'll start from the most important bits.


These are my "guides". I have been known to clutch these in a death-like grip. They are mine. Anyone touching them knows the universe may and will implode around them *jokes*.

To the left (blue) is the "Weekly Guide" This holds the schedule for the week, and all associated worksheets. The Middle (green) that very egocentrically has "Miss Edumacated" branded on it, is my Teachers Guide/Reference (hey, I like my name! :p ) binder. The one to the right (flowery brown) is my science Binder, which contains most of the Teacher stuff for science (so at least I *appear* to know what I am doing!)

Let's show a bit more about them.


This is my terrible cursive writing on the tabs of the Teachers/Reference Folder.
Tabs I have are:
Calendar: Everyday stuff/notes for trips/DH's work schedule
Supply Lists: Contains what is says, all the supply lists from curriculums
Movie Lists: Lists for Science, General, and History
Library List: I put everything together here and this helped me use my local librarys online Lists (I created Weeks 1-36 with them, then added appropriate books, all I have to do is check them all and hold them near the week I need them. I keep these are they are a backup hardcopy in case the library loses my lists.
History: Has various references/teacher cheat sheets, review cards etc
ABCs: Bits from our Pre-K curriculum that can't be organized by week
VIP/Misc: This has a protector sheet behind it and holds all my membership/support groups/subscriptions/receipts etc.

Here for example is a page from the "Supply Lists" tab, notice all the crosses/marks, I do mark-up my stuff! lol.

 
Now onto science:

 
My Science Binder has tabs for the different "threads" so a General/Overview, Animals, Human Body & Plants. All my teacher stuff and Lapbook components go in here.

Now back to that lovely binder shelf, or more specifically this part:

 
These are my binders that hold "all" of the schedules and worksheets. There are Six binders, each with six weeks worth of work in them, and each, originally named from 1-6.

 
And they each have tabs in them labelling the weeks with all the stuff behind it, so I can just grab a new week and plonk it into my "Weekly Guide" Binder.

Heres a little look see at the schedule I made up (used excel for weekly schedule pages and word for notes pages. We have 3 "schedule" pages per week. One Core, One LA, and One Electives, plus the "notes" pages. (Don't have a picture of Core page, but its roughly the same as the electives page).

 
This is the Language Arts page, its a little hard to see, but the vertical rows are colour co-ordinated with the Pre-K LA. So when I glance at what Atlas is doing I can just glance for the same colour down below and see what I can give to the littlies, to occupy them, if need be.

 
This is the electives page, the bottom bit just says that the littlies follow along (for both this & cores) if they want to.


And these are the "notes" pages behind the schedule. They are divided by day, then further by subject, for stuff I have to explain further about.

Heres a close-up:



Lastly, we were doing 1 Chapter of SOTW a week, which meant a few chapters would be left over. I just put the extra chapters in a display book, to do over the holidays:



So thats Part 1 of "Our Homeschool Series". Stay Tuned for further Parts!

And Happy Planning!

xxx
Miss Ed.

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Quick Lil Post

I'll be putting up photos of the schedule I "used" in the next 2 days. I just wanted to note that I'll no longer be following this schedule.

Originally I was following The Well Trained Mind Book to pretty much the letter, but as some mums do, I got blindsided a tad about the "perfect school" as opposed to the "perfect school for my child" which is, in fact, pretty much the total opposite. So after a year of lagging through this perfect ideal, we are going back to basics. Hence, the curriculum sell-out listed on another post.

We're going more into the way of using a Themed program for each year (loosely followed) with some more Project Based & Natural Learning. i want to take a step back and focus my whole time on Chaos (who will hopefully be going in to get a referral for an assessment & OT) & Atlas (whom we have to work on with her Diabetes & phonics) so everything other than that will be counted as less-important, thus the more relaxed lifestyle.

I have noticed even coming up with this decision, has relieve a big load of my shoulders I was not aware was there. We got much more "schooling" done in the past 3 days, then we did in the past 2 weeks, which, to me is absolutely amazing. Its confirming my choice, that although we are not following the Classical Curriculum of SWB, we are following something that is teaching my children to be life long learners.

But, we'll see how we go with this approach. :p


xxx

Miss Ed

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

When the curriculum comes tumbling down...



It one of those times we're people see me as a red glowing monster. Yes, you should stay out of the way, NO I am not mad, but I will be if you keep asking.

For the love of all that is gold, please leave me alone!

That pretty much sums it up.

So, obviously the "norm" thing for me now (every year) is a couple of weeks into our lovely planned curriculum, I scrap most of it.

So we're a few weeks in, I'm behind with my posts, I haven't even downloaded any of the images from the camera (so several hundred photos from the past few weeks are on there)

And I also went through all the stuff we've either dropped or are not using, and all I can think is..."Did Rainbow Resource suddenly expand in Australia? Mainly my library?"

So I am concentrating on removing all the extra stuff from there, so like I can pretend it never happened. Because it didn't, and if DH says elsewise, I'll go get him a beer, he'll forget all about arguing with me.

And now blogger hates me, putting a moving scroller across my screen so I couldn't access my blog.

So yep, still here....unfortunately :p I will have to get stuck in to getting caught up with the blog this weekend, and probably do quite a number of blog posts, and timer set them, as I think life keeps getting in the way of blogging every weekend.

Until then, I am randomly adding, removing and playing around on Pinterest: http://pinterest.com/missed/ so you can follow me there (I think there is a link over the right hand side also>>> ....somewhere.

xxx
Miss Ed