Planning

[duplofrenzy]

Given permission for one day a week flexischooling and 4 days at school. DS is age 6 and very motivated. Head teacher wants to see our planning in advance of each HE day. Eek! Can anyone advise on what to include in the planning? Or any ideas for topics?

It might be worth asking for the year's plan for history/geography etc so that you can do some projects based round that which are cross curricular and can cover areas that they won't do in school but which would enhance learning. For example if he is doing Romans in school, you could make Roman bread or visit a Roman site if there's anything in your area.

Hi

I'm not suggesting this should affect the way you home educate, but I just googled "TES key stage 1 lesson plans" and got quite a few useful links in terms of producing the kind of thing the Head might be looking for.

As someone who prefers to go with the flow, I would consider subverting the process by simply documenting whatever we had actually done the previous week and presenting it as the "plan" for the current week. So you are working a week ahead of "schedule".

I know that some teachers do that. It eliminates any risk of failing to achieve your aims!

I mean, I object pretty strongly on principle to rigid planning imposed by someone else, given that one of the advantages of HE is the flexibility to adapt to the child's interests.

It would be such a pity if your child was all fired up about prime numbers and wanted to spend the whole afternoon learning about them, when the plan specified that you'd be doing creative writing, do you know what I mean? What a wasted opportunity ti would be if you felt you had to stick to the plan against your child's wishes or risk criticism for failing to produce the writing.

When you say "very motivated", is it that he has the day off school because he is G&T and you want to do more advanced work? Or is the day off to settle him more into the structure of school work by having a day doing one to one work at home? Or is school proving too daunting at the moment and he needs a day to relax more? So decide what you want to achieve from the day off.
I home educate full time and tend to plan a timetable for the morning (and possibly early afternoon,) then have the late afternoon going to the park or round to friends, etc. I used Letts revision guides and workbooks to teach. You could always go to the education section of a bookshop and browse through to see what you and ds like.
One word of advice I would give is to stress to friends and family this is the time set aside for ds's education. The time could easily disappear with the sentence, "Oh, since you're just at home today, could you just..."

Good point about staying focused, Richmal - that sort of thing used to drive me mad when I worked from home!

Not really a problem with full-time home ed as there's plenty of time, but if you only have one day a week then it would be annoying to see it vanish... especially if the headteacher means to hold you accountable for sticking to lesson plans!

Thank you for your suggestions.
Richmal- he learns things easily and seems interested in pretty much anything, so I want the time to encourage this enthusiasm for learning and try to avoid losing it.

You are lucky to get flexi schooling for him. I would much have preferred it for my dd.
I'll give you a list of sites and books I've used with dd.

nrich
Khan academy
BBC bitesize
BBC Dance mat typing
Primary Maths Challenge (perhaps too young just now)

Royal Institution. As well as the website being worth a browse round, their DVDs of past Christmas Lectures are good and they hold family days once a month and KS1 lectures are open to home educators.

Books

Enchanted English (Letts)
Mythical Maths (also Letts)

Hope it all goes well

Thank you for sharing your list of resources with me - much appreciated. I have had a quick look at some of the web stuff and it looks great.
Thank you!

How about some days out? There are probably lots of interesting places you could get to in a day. What are your son's particular interests?

Hi,
I'm a primary school teacher and I would have thought that you should try to include about 30-40 minutes of literacy and numeracy in whatever form on your HE day. If I had the opportunity to HE I would do some formal learning first thing, followed by something creative....art/DT/music/drama/project work and then in the afternoon go on an educational type outing - museum, art gallery/science park or do something sporting like swimming/ball games/nature walk.

It sound fun! Good luck.

Also, its also worth phoning up places to see if there are special home education rates if planning a day out.