How I'm doing my lesson planning

On Friday or Saturday, I gather up all my materials and plan my lessons for the next week. I write my plan out in a teacher's lesson plan book. Then I just go through each subject and break it down.

So for Gospel Study, I take the Gospel Principles book and write in my planner which section and what page it's on. For writing, I write down the pages in HWT that he needs to do. For science, I look at the lesson plan in the teacher's manual and copy it to my planner. For history, I write down the SOTW section and page number and look in the activity guide and plan out which pages from there I want to do. For math and reading, I write down the lesson numbers. Math and reading average about 2 lessons a day.

I'm telling myself that it's ok if we aren't perfect at this yet. He wouldn't even enter kindergarten until this fall and I don't even have to report him to the school district until next fall. So to keep track of what we do get done, I highlight everything as we finish. So if he ends up doing three pages of math in one day, I highlight all three lessons that I'd planned. It helps me feel good about myself, "Oooo look at all that pink" (the color of my highlighter) and I can easily keep track of what we didn't get to; so if we don't do history one day, I know where to start the next.

I have five file folders, marked Monday-Friday. For all of the pages he needs to do, I print them off or take them out of the book and put them into their file folder. That way when I look at my lesson plan and it says, "Math 17A &B" I just pull out the folder for that day and the pages are already there.

I keep my lesson planner, all his books and supplies and these file folders in a plastic milk crate from Walmart. I went to the library and got the books for history and science. I got about three weeks worth of books for each subject and separated them into two other crates to keep it semi-organized. So once we do the science reading for the day, I look through the science crate and see if there are any other books related to what we studied that day and ask if he wants to read it. He usually does (I think science is his favorite). So we'll learn some more and talk about it. Then I pull out his science narration page and he gives me a sentence, usually starts with "My favorite part about (what we studied) is _____." I write it down, he makes a picture.

At the end of the week, all the work he's completed goes into his "completed work" binder. Some things like reading lessons can't go in there and I leave all his handwriting lessons in the book, but everything from the file folders goes into the binder, in the appropriate section. And I start planning for the next week.