Three homeschooling lists.

Every weekend during the school year, I open an assignment book to a new weekly page, ready for me to write down the week's assignments for each child.   I pull a particular binder off the shelf and begin paging through it, looking to see what I should plan for each subject.   As I find each bit of information, I write down the week's assignments in the spaces for each subject, occasionally making small changes where necessary to make up for a missed day here, or to leave room for an extra lesson there.  

I have daily pages in the assignment book as well; every morning I write on them a to-do list for each child, referring back to the weekly page I made over the weekend.   I often rearrange assignments within a given week, swapping Tuesday's for Thurday's, or finishing everything up early so as to get Friday off; so I never make advance plans any more finely than "weekly." 

The Master Binder was assembled before the beginning of the year.   I'm still working on the one for 2010-2011.  But I have the first three pages finished.

The first three pages of my binder are three sets of lists that I find very, very helpful when I go each week to do the lesson planning.  Maybe you will find them helpful too.  The lists are redundant:  they each give me the same information, a.k.a. "the basic weekly schedule."  The information is presented in slightly different form on each page.

Schedule by School Subject.  This is usually the one I put together first.  Here are the first few lines of it:

Religion:  5th grader, M.  1st grader, MW.  Family read-aloud:  F.

Literature:  Family read alouds:  MWF

Journaling:  5th grader and 1st grader:  MWF

Math:  5th grader, 5 lessons/week, MWF.  1st grader, 3 lessons/week, MWF.  4yo, WF.

…

Grammar:  5th grader,  T Th

You see how this one works —  for every subject that we study, it tells me which days of the week each child is supposed to "do" that subject.     I use this page mainly over the weekend when I'm writing down the upcoming week's lesson plans, to make sure that I include about the right amount of material from every subject.  To streamline that task, I have listed the subjects in the same order that they appear on the weekly assignment page.  Once I run down the list, I'm done with my weekly planning.  Incidentally,  the first half of this page has all my MWF (non-co-schooled) subjects, the second half has all the Tues-Thurs (co-schooled) subjects. 

Work Load by Child.  This page has three schedules on it, one for each child; each child's schedule has a list for Monday, a list for Tuesday, and so on.  It's the basic weekly plan of the subjects each child will study each day of the week.  For example, my first-grader this year has a schedule that looks like this:

Even though this page essentially re-presents the same information that the first page does, I use it a bit differently, tending to turn to it when I am setting up the daily pages for each child.  If it's Wednesday, and I'm writing the to-do list for the first-grader, I can see which subjects go on his to-do list.   I also have this same page in grid format.

The third page is more for me than for the children:  Teaching Load by Weekday.  This page has five lists, one each for Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.  Each list tells me what teaching tasks I can expect to spend my time on.  It doesn't include work that children can do entirely independently — for example, my fifth-grader's math lessons and journal writing don't appear, since he can do those with essentially no help from me.  It also doesn't include the subjects that are nearly always taught to my kids by some other adult.  So, for example, Mondays:

Mostly so I can keep it to a single page, I take daily planning, record keeping, set-up and clean-up for granted and don't include those in my daily list, although I give myself a long-term planning and record-keeping hour on Wednesdays.  This page shows me, not what my children need to do, but what I need to do that will actually take chunks of my time and direct attention.  I turn to this page first, to see what goes on my personal to-do list for the day.