Given the many different theories on homeschool curriculum, and the fact that I consider our homeschool to be eclectic, I had a lot of choices for making our overall lesson plan. I decided I'd consult with an expert - AT. I figured she knows best which way of learning and planning gets her excited. Together we determined that we'd start with her as a subject and keep expanding from there. I would set the overall lessons for the day but she gets to pick her work when she wants to. And that's it; pretty simple. Today for instance, she did copy work (a Charlotte Mason idea) from How Many Teeth, a favorite topic of hers that falls in with the "about my body" category, the she wanted to do color sequencing and patterning with beads, and right now she is doing a Priddy Books sticker activity book. The concepts within it are pretty easy for her, but she gets practice with concentrating, problem solving and fine motor skills - all of which she needs to work on. Throughout the day, we'll have discussions about the supporting roles neighbors, friends, neighborhoods and towns play in our everyday lives. Possibly also reasons for creating towns.

There is leeway in my lesson plan to account for her varying interests and frankly, for her moods. I don't really talk about the Montessori materials in this plan, as that is one of the things that we don't plan. Our use of the Montessori materials is 95% child led. Like in a classroom, I remind her of the presence of certain materials, but in general she decides when and what, or not. Here is the initial time-line outline I devised.

1. First Middle Last name
2. Birth date
3. Street address, Town name
4. Family
5. Neighbors / friends
6. Neighborhood / town
7. City (we live in a suburb of a large city so I'm using that opportunity to separate concepts)
8. State
9. Country
10. Continent
11. Earth
12. Solar system
13. Galaxy
14. Universe

If you'd like an expanded version of this outline, with some of the specifics under each heading, you can download our Homeschool Lesson Plan Outline

Montessori Checklist

I'm glad my Montessori Skills Checklist has been downloaded so many times - it's not a ton, but more than I expected. I'd love to hear from you if it has been helpful!

Modified Red Word Drawers

In my last post, I mentioned I was modifying the "Red Word Drawers". I am trying to find a way to share with you my MS Word document. So far, all I've seen is importing things to google docs and then linking it. That's all well and good, except it changes the document quite a bit. So just for the heck of it, I'm linking you to one of the pages. It only slightly resembles what I will actually be doing. Further, if you do not have the font I used on your computer, I don't know what the text will look like.

added:
tried scribd.com it doesn't read the font so it shows the vertical line character before the words which in the script font is the character for the beginning stroke of the letters. But it shows the pix and clip art so... here it is.

added:
trying box.net, see this
added: seems to be hosted by scribd so that's no help