Last week I shared what our curriculum would be this coming year. This week I worked on some prep work - my goal was to get the first 6 weeks worth of lessons printed and ready to go for Josh. I did get lessons 1-5 printed and part of lesson 1 laminated but I ran out of lamination and decided to hold off buying more until after vacation. In same cases I wouldn't "waste" lamination but, since I plan on reusing this material for Nate next year, it is important for the stuff to last. (I don't plan to laminate the stuff for Nate's lessons since this will be the only year we use that stuff). I am going to buy two Caryola wipe off boards that allow you to put a piece of paper under the surface so that worksheets can be used several times without needing to make multiple copies. I feel good about how far I got this week. The other big thing I did was actually count out our weeks and lay out our schedule for the year. After doing it both ways - "year round" and with the full summer off, I decided that I like the 6 weeks on/1 week off idea. That allows us to take all of December off and end the second of May. We will then have the rest of May, all of June and two weeks in July off. I need the breaks probably more than the kids do!
My stack of school papers - I love those plastic snapping folders. I get them at target and they are perfect for storing each lesson. Makes it easy to grab what I need each week.
Here's our calendar! The red dates are holidays; blue are vacation dates and yellow are school days.
The other thing I worked on was our vacation binders. If kids have something to do in the truck the parents don't go insane HA! My boys love maps so one of the things I did was print of maps for all of our destinations both coming and going. I then laminated them and made sure they had some markers to follow our trip :-) (I just searched online until I found a map I liked and printed it . . .)
I also printed some coloring pages of some of the things we would do and see and included a big photo of the bridge so that they would know what to look for as we traveled.
I included these ABC pages which actually are for a different activity but I told the boys that they could draw a picture on each page of something they see while on vacation that matches the letter. Then, I laminated the ABC cards to practice writing their letters.
(can't find the source for this as the moment - I saved it a LONG time ago!!)
One thing I did not get a photo of is a set of Alphabet coloring pages from
Mr. Printables. These will probably show up during our year of school too ;-)
My other main focus this week, of course, was getting ready for vacation. That included, packing, cleaning, and making sure that all details were taken care of before we left. I like to leave my house nice and clean so that when we come home, the only thing we do is unpack . . Trust me, Saturday evening, there was a lot of vacuuming and last minute pick-up happening!!!
