Planning My Week 2020: Part 2

If you missed Part 1 you can find it by clicking here.

In Part 2 I will take you through how I plan a week of school work as I do it!

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Step 1: Pick a Book from Five in a Row

Since I use FIAR as my main curriculum I start by picking a book to study for the week. Last week we did The Story about Ping. This week we decided on Madeline (mostly because we already have a copy).

Step 2: Put ‘180 days of’ and other worksheets in her Binder

So this might seem backwards, but since the ‘180 days of’ workbooks have weekly themes I like to go ahead and sort them out so I can see what units I can incorporate into FIAR.

For example with the Spelling book she will be cover the short ‘a’ which goes with the sound in Madeline’s name. The writing worksheets focus on an opinion piece about E.V.’s favorite teacher, but I will change it to be about her favorite character.

The rest of the sheets don’t mesh well so they will be used stand alone.

I have a binder that has a set of eight colorful tabs and five white tabs at the back. Each of the white tabs equals one day. I put one sheet from each ‘180 days of’ workbook and two ‘word ladder’ worksheets (E.V.’s request), a brainteaser worksheet, a draw, write now activity, and her MEP worksheets.

This may sound like a lot, but it’s all very easy and takes her 30-60 minutes to finish all of the worksheets listed above. She seems to love zipping through them all.

Step 3: Pick Concepts and find Activities/Notebook Pages

With the worksheets in the binder I return to FIAR to pick the concepts we will be learning about this week.

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Geography

For Geography we’ll be learning about France. I already have a country packet that comes with a flip book for E.V.’s interactive notebook so it’s a no brainer.

Here’s the link to the country pack again if you want to take a look!

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Math & Art

I’m going to look at Symmetry to hit both Math and Art.

We are going to fold paper airplanes in this lesson, because I know she loves them, but we haven’t played with them in a while. We can compare how symmetrical vs assemetrical planes fly.

I have of Advanced Paper Aircraft Construction I got at a book sale so we’ll use that!

We’ll also do some math equations using her balance to show how equations are symmetrical with the ‘=’ being the fulcrum

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Language Arts

In addition to analyzing the story itself, we’ll be looking at Poetry for our unit on Language Arts. I think the focus will be on rhyming and symmetry.

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Science

For science we’ll look at health and our bodies, and talk about Madeline’s appendix. We’ll talk about healthy habits and explore in out See Inside Your Body Book.

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Step 4: Gather Resources

This is just like it sounds. I gather pages from interactive notebooks and teachers pay teachers. I pull books off shelves and gather them together. Generally see what I have to work with.

Step 5: Assign Units to Days based on Plans

This week we have meet ups Tuesday-Thursday mornings and my Mom and my Brother and his family are going to be in town from Wednesday-Saturday.

This means I need to scale back my expectations for the end of the week.

So Monday we will analyze the story and do our geography study since the country flipbook is the most intensive work we have planned.

Tuesday we will talk about poetry and rhyming.

Wednesday we’ll do a unit about health and our bodies.

Thursday we’ll do symmetry because I think her cousin would enjoy making paper airplanes with her.

Friday we’ll take it easy and she’ll look at pictures from her Mom’s trip to Paris and compare the real buildings to the ones in the book.

Step 6: Finish up the binder

Now that I know when we are doing each unit I put the materials in her binder so the week is all prepared.

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Wrap-up

This process takes a 3-4 hours on Sunday. Before I did it this way I was spending a couple hours each night trying to prepare for the next day. This works much better!

Anyway, I hope this insight into my process helps someone, even if it is only my wife!

Cheers,

Lawrence

Home Poppy

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