Sunday, October 15, 2006

Time to Plan for the Week

For the first time, I'm using my Homeschool Tracker Plus to help me plan for the week. There's a journal section and I'm babbling out my thoughts there and getting things organized. It's going quite well!

One change I made to my planning technique is this: use the priority coding I learned from either Hyrum Smith or Stephen Covey. What is this technique, you ask? Well, I'll share.

Here's how it works: you list all the things you would like to accomplish for the day (or week, in my current case). Then, thinking about your priorities, which you've hopefully already thought about, you go through and label the items A for the "musts", B for the "shoulds" and C for the "coulds". This way, your attention is brough to your A's and you make sure to get those done instead of letting your focus move towards things that just aren't as important to you right now.

For a daily list, you would then give them numbers in the order they should be done in. However, for my weekly planning, I'm not going to do that. Or maybe I should. I was thinking it wasn't necessary, I just want to be able to know what I really have decided must get done, but perhaps it would help to have the order of some activities planned out, too.

Want to know what this looks like? Ok. I start with my list as the things come to me for the subject and student I'm working on.

ELA
N:
--review phonics cards/sheet
--have him write down specific phonograms
--continue spelling notebook
--handwriting
--reading with me: War of the Worlds
--writing: Dear _________, [one sentence comment]. Sincerely, N.
--silent reading


Then I think about what I had decided was really important to continue or to start at this point and prioritize with my A, B, C's.

ELA
N.:
B--review phonics cards/sheet
B--have him write down specific phonograms
A--continue spelling notebook
A--handwriting
A--reading with me: War of the Worlds
A--writing: Dear _________, [one sentence comment]. Sincerely, N.
A--silent reading


So, now I will apply the numbering. No, that won't work in this case. See, if I do the B's, they will probably be at the same time we do the spelling notebook. So, the original purpose of the A, B, C's, as given by Smith or Covey, was to keep yourself doing only your A's before you got to your B's, but that would give something very strangely organized if I do that. In my above case, it's the B's with the spelling notebook or not the B's at all. Maybe I can still kind of work out an order:


ELA
N.:

B--review phonics cards/sheet
B--have him write down specific phonograms
A--continue spelling notebook
A--handwriting
A--reading with me: War of the Worlds
A--writing: Dear _________, [one sentence comment/question]. Sincerely, N.
A--silent reading

Nope, it's not going to work because I often give him a choice of what he wants to do first. Ok, so much for that! lol. However, having decided the A's and the B's helps me having things focused better.

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