Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Progress on Year 7 -- basic course breakdown beta

I finished the basic outline of Year 7. It is in PDF form. Some of the classes are outlined more specifically than others. Partly that is because of the difference between the "skill" lessons and the more "exploratory" ones. I will probably keep tinkering with it and will eventually upload a doc version -- I converted this one to PDF because I wasn't sure if the Word 2007 format would transfer easily to the older Word format.

I have almost finished writing more specific lesson plans for the first Term (I have divided the year into 6 Blocks so I can follow the trimester system of the local schools (since Sean is going to school this year, that is more of a consideration than it was in past years). In order to have some kind of unity, I wanted to be able to think in terms of six Blocks (I wish I could think of a better word).

Each Block will have a list of Sub-Topics and then I can decide which subjects have priority, dependent on what we've emphasized in past blocks, interest, life circumstances and that sort of thing.

Does that make sense?

For example, right now the first Block out of the six has this outline:

  • Religion -- first part of creed.... Creation and early salvation history.
  • Bible History -- Early Salvation History.
  • History -- exploration and early discovery, focus on Americas. Geography related to history; same with literature and readers, poetry and arts.
  • Science -- Galileo, astronomy
  • Math -- Advanced Multiplicaton and Division (work a bit on algebraic terminology)
  • Latin & Classical History -- Romulus & Theseus, review of 1st and 2nd conjugations and declensions, etc.
  • Greek & NT -- Gospel of Mark, reading Greek letters (review) and prepositions
  • Logic. .... Statements. Grammar -- prepositional phrases, review of modifiers.
  • Composition -- Narrative
You get the picture. By having this laid out, I can "hyperfocus" on these topics and fill them out in detail. So I want to get together materials and ideas for these specific subjects and since there is quite a bit there, decide what we should dwell on more thoroughly and what can take second place. Also figure out connections between the different subjects -- not so much for Kieron, since I want him to make his own connections, but for ME.

Now that I have this laid out, I can also figure out composition topics, poetry and Scripture memorization choices, dictation and copywork selections, research topics and that kind of thing. That's where I always end up unprepared during the school year -- so my goal for this year was to prepare it ahead of time, hopefully gathering way more than I can actually use.

Final note -- I'd liked to get each block summarized like the one above, and have a little packet for each one, but I don't want to micro-plan too far ahead.

Also, a day by day schedule -- to help me figure out what we are doing each day. Here is the first page, in gif.

No comments:

Post a Comment