Welcome to a brand new school year! I love buying school supplies, opening up the textbooks, and planning. How about you? As you begin, I would like to offer some suggestions for consideration in helping you begin your school year.

1. Teach Short Lessons I have learned from experience that it takes much longer for subjects and concepts to be taught and completed when they are new. The first one or two weeks consider making your lessons shorter than you normally would allow. For example, if you are teaching about maps to a primary student, one day’s lesson could be exploring the globe and looking at how much of the world is water in comparison to how much land there is on our planet. Instead of a spending 30-45 minutes on a lesson,  discuss it for 20-30 minutes. If you plan for this then you won’t feel anxious in cutting down on the amount of time you would usually spend.

2. Keeping short lessons in mind, plan out your week. Life is more relaxed when you know what you are doing. 🙂 Start with the required subjects and add any extra curricular activities in which your children are involved. For instance, Monday and Wednesday can be language arts, math, social studies, and health (remember to include safety and first aid  somewhere in your school year). Tuesday and Thursday’s schedule would be to study language arts, math, science reading and an experiment. Friday you can plan to wrap up the week with language arts, math, social studies or science, and add art, fine arts, physical education or a field trip.

3. Begin with fewer subjects At the beginning of the year you can start with reading, math, and perhaps science or social studies and add the other subjects.

4. Consider starting earlier. I loved starting school early as I felt this gave me and my sons time to get into the swing of things. August is usually very warm, the boys were more inclined to stay indoors and were in need of some structure. We would have a light schedule of math and reading and either art or science experiments since they usually required more set-up and clean-up time throughout the year.

5. Remember to add fun into your planning.  Science doesn’t need to be confined to the house with a lab filled with beakers and concoctions. Take advantage of good-weather days and go on a nature walk or take a trip to the zoo to study animals and habitats.

Wishing you a great and relaxing year! 🙂

~Lisa