Organizing A Week's Lessons

Last summer a fellow homeschool parent shared this link  from Dana Rayburn about an organization tip for students with ADHD.  My toads and I don't have ADHD but this is a great idea to help anyone stay organized.  We used it to manage our daily studies for about 4 months and then we fell off the wagon.

It fell down for us in a couple of ways:

• It was time consuming for me to prepare the week's folders.  I'd do the post-its and slip in worksheets for each day.  It made for a bit of double prepping because I already had a master spreadsheet of goals for the month.  We live in Florida and the state requires we keep track of what we do so I'd have then record everything in binders which meant 3 levels of handling the same information.  Sometimes we didn't do everything and I'd have to refile the extras.

• Toad learned to cherry pick.  He caught on in about two days that I was stacking activities the fun activities to later in the day and we had the daily debate about why we couldn't start with the fun stuff.

 

• It was Kindergarten for Toad and learning the calendar is pretty important.  He had the days of the week down no problem but it wasn't helping him track the month as a whole or visualize the difference between the 10th and 24th of the month.

• ... and I had guilt about recycling stacks of post-its.  I started getting vague on them, like writing reading, rather than names of books, so I could reuse them but then we had to have the conversation about which book and "Why can't I read that one instead?".

So it seemed like a great technique but not the one for us.

This year we're trying a blank student assignment journal I got cheap from Rainbow Resources.  I printed mini labels from the office supply store with our subjects.  When he's done with a subject he puts the sticker in the right row and column and I add in the specifics, i.e. name of the book.  It's taking less time than the other method and not difficult.  The down side however, is the book came blank.  It doesn't have any pre-printed dates or even spots to write it in.  He's too literal for writing in margins so I'm doing that but again we're missing the larger calendar reinforcing.  It also doesn't allow us to track regularly scheduled items well, like sports practice the same time every week.

So I'm thinking of tweaking it yet again. 

Homeschool Creations shared a calendar math printable recently.  I'm thinking about incorporating more official 'classroom' type calendar activities into our day but still use the sheets to track what we actually did in the day so it keeps my workload down.

I know many of you have good homeschool organization ideas.  Feel free to comment your ideas or links to things you've found helpful.  I'm clearly on the search for the "perfect" way to keep us organized.