"Teacher" Prep Week

I've always loved this week in homeschooling ~ it's the week that I finish my lesson planning, gather any supplies that are still needed, and get our learning space organized. I geek out on office supplies and lesson plans, LOL!

Tonight I ordered the readers that I wasn't able to find used this summer. My order came to $32 and I had an Amazon voucher for $35 from turning in coin a couple of weeks ago. Woot! We've decided to use what we have as much as possible this year and to economize where we can. With that in mind I have purchased one copy of each reader; if a second copy isn't available from the library we will share. The library has 1 -2 copies of each book but we can't guarantee that they will be available to borrow when we actually need them, hence owning one copy of each book will be insurance that we can stay on track.

I had read about Sue Patrick's Workbox System on several blogs and message boards and even know a few people in my area who are giving it a try this year. I bought the book and am adapting it (very loosely) to work for my boys. We have 8 shoe boxes per child on nice bookcases in the family room. I'll use them to organize the boys' daily lesson work. My goal is for them to take on some responsibility for the work they can do independently and also to give them visual information about what we will be doing. I am sure that the rhythm of what we are doing will become integrated very quickly and at that point the boxes will mostly serve as organizers for our work.

Another project I am working on in preparation for the beginning of our "school" year is creating a chore system. I have made charts in the past but they always failed because I would forget to print new charts each week. Jennifer at Tree of Life Homeschool posted awhile back about a magnetic chore chart she made and it looked like something that could work for us, so we bought the magnets and I will be printing out images and/or cue words and will make our chart this week.