Planning Senior Year

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I cannot believe I'm planning the senior year for my youngest child. It doesn't seem possible, and yet here we are. Whatever will I do with myself when I don't have any lesson plans to work on during the summer? That's a serious question. I like lesson planning.

The good news is that the actual lesson planning process is relatively painless this year! Kennady will be taking Creative Writing, US History, Speech and Presentation II, and French II at the co-op. I don't really need to do anything about lesson plans for Speech or French, nor will I need to worry about plans for Senior Chorus or Guitar. The only reason I'm doing lesson plans for Creative Writing and US History is because I'm the teacher for those classes! I will need a lesson plan for Consumer Math, but I think that's the only class she'll be doing completely at home.

The US History planning has mostly been done already! That's because my boys also did the course, so I'd already done the work of entering it into the Homeschool Tracker Online. Using the Lesson Plan feature makes planning as simple as re-using what I've already entered! So in a way, all I need to do is assign from the Lesson Plan according to the schedule and specific assignments, without having to re-create the entire course in the program. I did make adjustments, additions, and changes this year, because I'm teaching the class at the co-op instead of just to my student. Basically I sat down with stack of textbooks (I also had an older and newer edition of Exploring America to compare), and jotted down some notes on the assignments, and then editing the information I'd already put into the planner.



Normally I schedule assignments from the Lesson Plan about a month in advance, but since the co-op keeps us on a schedule, I'll be able to schedule the entire year ahead of time. I'm sure there will be some minor changes along the way! I decided not to print the entire assignment list at this point though.

Lesson planning for Creative Writing is a little more involved, since I haven't taught the course before. I'm still in the pen and paper planning stage with this one. When I do get it laid out, I'll put it in the Homeschool Tracker Online as well. 

Sometime very soon I'll need to take a look at the details of the Consumer Math program we're planning on, and will enter those assignments into the Homeschool Tracker Online.  

Homeschool Tracker Online is one of the most valuable tools I have in my homeschool! I use pen and paper for most of the preliminary planning, but the Tracker is the workhorse I use to keep track of everything else once those barebones plans are in place.

I love this program for keeping track of lesson plans, assignments, due dates, time spent, resource lists, and more. It's also my record of grades and credits, which makes it pretty easy for me to calculate quarterly or semester grades when I need to submit those to my oversight group. In fact, I could make my own transcript if I needed to! When I make a lesson plan in the Tracker, I can save it to use again with another student, so many of the lesson plans I'll be using for Kennady were created for my older kids, saving me time now. All I have to do is tell the Tracker when to schedule the assignments! (There are shared lesson plans available in the program as well, meaning that if someone else has already created a lesson plan for a particular curriculum and submitted it to the HST community, you can use it!) Once I've got lesson plans entered, I can assign to my student as needed. For us, that's usually about a month's worth of lessons at a time. I print the assignment lists for Kennady to check off as she completes them so it's easy for both of us to keep track of where we are. Then, when we inevitably move faster or slower than we'd planned, or decide to leave something out or change an assignment, it's easy to reschedule and print a new assignment list for the next month or so.

For more info, see my related posts:

High School Assignment Tracking




Back to Homeschool Coffee Break - Planning Our Year

(Read my full review of Homeschool Tracker Online here: Homeschool Tracker Online: A Homeschool Coffee Break Review.)

Visit the Homeschool Review Crew blog for the Planning, Planners, and Preparing for the New Homeschool Year Round-up, and see what other Crew members are sharing on this subject. (August 10, 2018)

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