Over the next few days (weeks?), you’ll probably see a few protected posts on the blog. You may be wondering what is going on. Well, I’m working on putting together homeschool courses for Munchkin. Because Munchkin is working fairly independently now, I need to assemble all her course work (as much as possible) in advance. We’ve tried a variety of methods of presenting assignments, but I’m beginning to see that she likes having everything laid out up front. This gives her an idea of what to expect for the class itself. Basically, she likes to have a “college style” syllabus from which to work.
I have to be honest and say that although I use to be great about getting everything planned for a year in advance I haven’t been doing as well with that sort of planning in her older years. When I planned so far in advance when she was younger, we would get off course and all of the planning would start to go down the drain. I started to build more flexibility into our schedule. Eventually, I got to the point that my planning involved knowing what we were covering for the year, the curriculum that we’d use to cover it, and the goals for the year. I already knew that we’d make changes throughout the year to accommodate opportunities, interests, and review items. We were both okay with this method except for when I got sick.
When I was down sick, the prep work for the week didn’t always get done which left Munchkin without her needed guidance to get things done. What happened? Well, those particular subjects were set aside until I felt better. At times like this, not having everything done in advance was not working for us. We needed to find a balance between completely planned out and too relaxed. That’s pretty much where we’re at right now. We’re still tweaking the routine to find what really works for us for now which lead to me putting together these classes. By doing this, she’ll have the basic course outline in advance. As much as possible, I will be inputting and assembling all necessary materials ahead of time. She’ll be able to go online (to the blog) and get her course information. Instead of daily lessons, she’ll see what she needs to accomplish for the week and schedule her studies accordingly.
Of course, this is all just a trial run to see how it goes. If it works, I’ll probably be adding more classes as we go along. Once the class syllabus is complete (or at least mostly complete), I’ll probably take off the password protection. I’m still deciding how to handle that one. So, that’s what’s going on with the password protection and in our homeschool.
