Getting from the Big Picture to the Daily Assignment

Now that you have seen my Big Picture and Daily Assignment sheet, I hope to share how I got from point A to point B.

When developing my Big Picture, I benefited from Laura Berquist's recommendation to sit down with different homeschool curriculum and figure out how they progress through the subjects. I created similar spreadsheets to chart the different curricular. It helped me see how different schools developed different plans to reach their specific academic goals. Seeing different roadmaps helped developed mine. There's no right "Big Picture" but I am more dedicated to homeschooling when the journey is logical to me.

My Big Picture is an excel spreadsheet. It doesn't include what books I would use but what subjects I hope to cover. Across the top are subjects similar to Mater Amabilis. Down the column are the grades. I try not to change MA's curriculum too much because I do generally like it but there are definitely changes. Every once in a while, I tweak the big picture as my goals and my understanding of my children changes.

When the new school year rolls around, I look at the year's goals and pursue my personal library before even looking at a catalog. I realize that if I can't use a good but not perfect resource on my shelf, it really doesn't belong there. For example, last year, I was pleasantly surprised that my Childcraft encylopedia was a perfect curriculum for us that covered a wide range of subjects as advocated by Charlotte Mason. So my son read a chapter in each of the volumes and I didn't buy anything new.

After I have the books in hand, I switch and plan bottom up. Instead of taking a book and breaking it into 36/38 weeks assignments, I figure how much my son can read and retain in a single seating. Sometimes it's a page, sometimes it's a lesson or a chapter. It just depends. Whatever he can handle is assigned and he goes through the book until he finishes it. Then that book is replaced by another that fits that particular genre.

I break the work into daily work and alternate day work. So daily work are subjects like math and foreign language. Alternate day work are subjects like history and science. Alternate day work isn't dependent on the actual day of the week but on what he has accomplished the last school day.

And the final tweaking is to see how long it takes for him to finish a day's work and whether he can focus for that long. If he can't, I drop or reduce the assignments.

It doesn't take so much guesswork now because I'm working off what he has been doing last year. And as the year passes by, I very slowly challenge him with harder readings, longer readings, more challenging narration etc.

So there you have it. The hard part is figuring the Big Plan but I don't worry too much over it because it changes frequently. I think of homeschool as a journey. It's okay to take detours.