Tuesday, August 21, 2007

It's official: two weeks left!

Only two weeks left until my nephew goes back to school and the two oldest come to me for school. Yikes!

I have to finish the 13yo's plans, including the specifics of his first week (or perhaps the specifics of what *I* have to do if I can't specify content rate). I worked on his language arts plan yesterday. Left to do for him: have a look at the gr. 8 math text and the TLE CDs and get an idea of what will actually work best for him; roughly plan out his science; roughly plan out his social studies if I'm not having him do the same as dd; plan out a French course; plan out any tracking charts; plan out the first week.

For the 16yo, I'm in the process of planning out her Chemistry. The school doesn't have things ready yet as a guide and I kind of decided that it's not a bad idea as my assignment list has various study tips added in here and there, mainly things I've taken from What Smart Students Know. Her French isn't done yet, her CALM isn't done yet, I need to have another look at her Social Studies now that I have the textbooks and distance learning materials. Math is math, although it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to prepare some quizzes and extra practice sheets before the year gets started. Oh, and I want to put together questions that can be used for chem quizzes as I plan on giving her a really short quiz pretty much every day! Slowly build up her confidence in test-taking, plus just really show her the kind of practice it takes to learn material. Some reminders/tips that show up in her chem plan and just on a welcoming sheet for the year are that the average (C) student does only what is required; the above-average student (A/B) does more than just what is required. Other than that, nothing else has to be prepared for first semester. I still have to finish reading Lord of the Flies for her English (second semester) and we'll see about me maybe setting up her bio and physics the way I'm setting up her chem. Physics will probably require extra practice for sure. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Oh, and one last thing for all of them is to fill in the ed. plan form for our school board.

Other than that, I have some more school supply shopping to do and have the 'school room' (where certain texts, binders and personal items are kept) to clean up. Lots of stuff to do!

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