I’m so glad you came to see my new home on the web! If you’ve read me for very long, you know that my sons have some challenges. We daily live with and teach two boys whose brains were drug-affected when they were in their biological mothers’ wombs. Both are affected differently, with varying severity that appears in different and sometimes surprising places and ways. For us, it is life. For them, it is normal. Normal for us is not going to be the same normal that you live with. Normal for someone else will be completely different also.
It’s funny how I can lose sight of things when I create An Agenda. You know what I mean. I can’t be the only one who tends to live by the almighty Lesson Planner! Right? Tell me I’m not alone here. It just looks so good to see all those lessons written out so neatly in the little white squares in my planner. It looks so… accomplished. So tidy. So productive!
So what’s the problem?
My planner for Tuesday may say “Handwriting p. 21 #2; Math Lesson 36; Spelling List Day 38 full assignment parts 1-5 on SpellingCity; Read aloud 30 min.; History- Read Ch. 7 and do Explorers lapbook parts 3 and 4; Health p. 17-20; Grammar p. 139 Common and Proper Nouns” but what gets done looks more like “Math Lesson 36; Spelling List Day 38 assignment pts. 1-2; Grammar p. 139.”
This is life. This is life with a child who struggles to stay focused and takes over an hour to do a ten minute copywork assignment in his handwriting book. This is life with two boys who take off like rockets at lunch time, and reeling them back in for more school work afterward takes the patience of a saint. And I’m no saint.
What happens to those neat little white boxes full of so much productivity? Well let me tell you: Nothing. I quit writing lesson plans down ahead of time. These days I’m all about loose planning, going with the flow, and documenting everything after the fact. It’s the only way I can come out not feeling like we are failing, because with special needs you just can’t always plan for everything.
We go day by day, and week by week. We do get that history project done sometime during the week, just maybe not on Tuesday. The math and spelling do almost always get done, because they are both on the computer and the boys love using the computer for school work. And the other things? Experiences sometimes trump lessons anyway.
Two weeks ago the boys were in the thick of things when for three days, we had a concrete crew here that tore out our driveway and poured new concrete. They watched, they helped, and they asked questions. Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. That week, not a lot of actual “school work” got done, but don’t try to tell me they didn’t learn. I documented hours’ worth of social studies, PE, life science and occupational education over the course of those three days.
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Homeschoolers love their planners, and I am no different. My personal choice for planners is actually a digital journal. I have used the Homeschool Daybook for a long time now, and I love it. It is lesson relaxed schoolwork documentation. It is simple and easily customized, and guess what?(Click the screenshots for close-ups!)
