How I Plan a Year

Are you having trouble figuring out how to get started? Here's how I do it. Take what you like and leave the rest. :)

First, I choose the calendar. The state requires me to conduct school on a regular schedule and to keep a record of instructional days. Normally we start a new year on Labor Day and have school almost every weekday until the end of June (with a separate summer session for July-August). I like to use a spreadsheet, with each row being one week; if you prefer, you can rotate yours 90 degrees and make each column a week instead. I make note of when holidays and other special events are likely to fall that year--for example, one set of grandparents always visits during a certain week--and code those weeks purple. Timeanddate.com is a helpful page for looking up dates in years ahead. I also pick a week for standardized testing (required in North Carolina) and turn it orange, and then go back a couple of months and make myself a note to order the test.
In the far upper-left corner, which is otherwise wasted space, I note four weeks when it's time to take stock of the child's progress and write up a narrative progress report for the past quarter. This process helps me to see growth over the course of the year and from one year to the next.

Why don't I use a hand-written planner? If we don't get to something this week, I don't want to erase or white-out what I have for next week and squeeze it in. I don't want arrows from a sick day to various places on other pages. I like the neat look of typing. And if I waited until, say, Sunday night to write down my plans for the week, it might not happen at all, or might not be done very well: What was that other book we were going to read next? How far did we get in science last time? Game night took longer than I expected, so I guess I'll do it in the morning.... No, that's not how I want to do things. (INFJ, can you tell?) There's nothing wrong with an off-the-cuff style if it's working for you, but I know from experience that it's not for me.

Since I plan by the week, it's important that I not choose more than we can do in a real week--one with a piano lesson a half-hour away, probably a homeschool activity or field trip, a library visit, a trip to a park, a scout meeting, the housework, and so on. I like to have enough margin that we are not frantic when there's something extra going on as well. Why set myself up to go to pieces when there's a wait at the dentist's office?
If you look at the spreadsheet, you'll see we don't have a lot of breaks planned. That's because my child thrives on routine. A couple of hours of school a day, about 220 days a year works a lot better for our family than 175 jam-packed days.Your mileage may vary, especially if you go away for the summer, for example.

Now that I have my calendar, I know my limits, and this will help me avoid over- or under-planning. Next, I make each column a subject (math, history, science...), keeping work we'll do at the table to the left and the "couch subjects"--those without written output--on the right, since that's the order that works best for us.
I can't do anything more until I get my hands on the curricula I choose for each. That's why I often order everything in late winter or early spring for the following fall. When I see or hear about something interesting that I may want to use in a few years, I make a note of it in my spreadsheet so I don't forget. Sometimes I buy something I'm sure I want to use, but not yet, and start filling in pages for future years--tentatively, of course, but it's so easy to cut and paste that I'm not worried about wasting my effort.

Work in progress

Once I have my materials, I look through one subject at a time and consider how much we're likely to be able to do in a week. I type chapters, page numbers or topics in the correct squares on my spreadsheet. I make notes about supplementary activities, too, so you'll see some links or comments like "See Pin." By June, I've filled in the whole thing.

Each month, I print out anything needed for the next month and ProClick it together into booklets, one for the table (currently mostly language arts materials) and the other for the couch (memory work, etc).

On Labor Day, I promote my child to the next grade and preview the year's materials with him. We talk about what our typical week will look like this year.

During the school year, as we complete a subject's work for the week, I turn it gray on the spreadsheet. If there's a subject we're not doing very consistently, I can see that clearly. Am I avoiding something that's messy (read: art), that the child complains about (again: art), or that I don't find worth the effort? That tells me I need to either choose another resource or be more disciplined with what I have--or perhaps drop something that is just not useful right now.

When my student is older, I may use more complex tools--some people choose Trello or OneNote and have the student do more of the record-keeping, for example. However, the spreadsheet has worked very well for me for preK through third grade, and I might keep it as an overview even if I use something else in addition in the future.

2014-2015 Round-Up

For the legal school year July 1, 2014, through June 30, 2015, we completed 249 days of school. There were twelve holiday/vacation days and one sick day. The rest were weekends (except that we did use one Saturday as a school day.)
We took over three dozen field trips, not counting duplicate visits to the same museums. We saw Jupiter's four largest moons through a telescope, gathered eggs from a hen house, ice skated, picked strawberries, and admired two-thousand-year-old sculptures.
We read about Alexander the Great as well as Gerald and Piggie. We measured rainfall; we threw paint-filled eggs at a canvas. We traveled out of state twice, north and south.
How magnificent time can be, when we set our own schedule. Yes, there was time for piano lessons and swimming lessons, but also time to climb a tree, explore a stream, dig in the sand with friends. Time to meditate, and time to make a raucous noise. There was time to ride roller coasters. Time to mess around with magnets.
It was a year of abundance. Next year will not be the same, but a new series of adventures. Whatever the future brings, we had a great first-grade year.

What was missing from my education?

I'm thinking back to my K-12 education--what I remember of it. While it was adequate in that I finished twelfth grade reasonably well prepared for college, I didn't like it much (especially grades 4-8), and I want to avoid making some of those same mistakes with my own child.
I went to school in three different districts in two states. What was missing? This is a draft, as I'm thinking 'aloud' here.

1) A sense of direction.
I didn't feel that I had any kind of road map, that there was some intentionality behind the daily assignments. This was especially true when the assignments were required without regard for whether I had already mastered the skills or content they were intended to reinforce. I'm not sure that many teachers, districts, or states had given deep thought to why we were marching through the curriculum--but if they had, it was not shared with the students. Consequently, I was disengaged. Some candor about purpose, some framing, some throughlines, some drawing attention to recurring themes would have been so nice. I feel that if we want kids to connect the dots, we have to let them know that the dots are intended to make a big picture.

2) Tinkering.
Nearly everything was a closed-ended question: monkey see, monkey do. I got very good at providing right answers, fast, with no creativity. The purpose of any activity was predetermined and generic, and any "what ifs" were considered a distraction. When I eventually had a chance to create my own project in a gifted pull-out program, I had no ideas. I had neither had enough input nor been encouraged to build the skills to generate something of my own. (However, I did very well on the SAT.)
For student-owned project time to be effective, students must have access to generative topics on a regular basis, and there must be time to delve into material and then allow it to sink in before we ask for output.

3) The physical world.
I sat and was lectured to in class; I sat and read books (my main hobby); I sat in front of the TV. I did little with my body and little outdoors. Half an hour of PE once a week only confirmed my sense that I was clumsy. Now that screens are everywhere, the danger of being disconnected from physical reality is all the worse.

4) Genuine inquiry into other places and peoples.
I didn't get to start a foreign language until seventh grade, and then it was at a 'lite' level. Anything we did with regard to other countries and times was superficial; there was no serious attempt to understand viewpoints significantly different from our own, much less how they evolved or unfolded. Of all the ways in which my education was shallow, this might be the worst, in that it subtly devalued other human beings.

5) Community.
There was no sense of being on a team working toward a common vision. There were rules, but they did not emerge from a consensus of our values; they were merely imposed. Achievements were for one's own sake, mostly in that they increased one's status with adults. We were not in it to change the world, not to benefit our neighbors, but to get a good report card. Especially as kids get older, this is patronizing; it's no wonder that so many eventually decide the hoops are not worth jumping through.

6) Reflection.
There was no time set aside, when we finished something, to consider honestly what we had gotten out of it and whether it was any good. Like #1, if this was being done, it was not done by the students. As with many of these missing items, the lack of planned reflection indicates that students do not have the authority to shape their own learning.

Links to look at

I love the Information Age! It's so easy to find people who can inspire and inform my teaching. If you're not familiar with any of these resources, by all means, take a look:

• Lori Pickert, author of Project-Based Homeschooling. Great post here on DIY for kids.
• Teacher Tom, lead teacher at a play-based preschool. Great post here: Plastic Hammers.
• Amy Night, kindergarten teacher. Great post here on behavior management in kindergarten.
• Dan Meyer, math teacher. Interesting post here on digital textbooks.
• Geoff Krall, math teacher. Post on getting kids to be willing to work hard.
• Jose Vilson, math educator/activist. Post and interesting comments on open doors in classrooms.
• Audrey Watters, education writer. Thoughts on ed tech and politics.
• Alfie Kohn. Even if you haven't heard of the others, you probably know of Kohn--but if not, here's a link to some of his articles.

Happy reading!

On Math

First, some observations:
1) An awful lot of people are intimidated by math.
2) Many people are rather bad at math. I don't mean in the haven't-done-trig-in-twenty-years-and-would-have-to-do-it-over sense, but in the never-really-understood-fractions sense.
3) Groups 1 and 2 overlap quite a bit.
4) A fair number of elementary school teachers fall into group 1 and/or 2. If you don't believe that, please read Liping Ma's book Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics (some libraries will have it as an e-book).

It wouldn't be surprising, then, that having parents and/or teachers who fear, loathe, or lack skill in math would lead to kids' lack of confidence and competence.

What to do?

I propose a math refresher course to reinforce not just procedural, but conceptual math for adults. The main ideas:

• Math is not here to confuse you, but to help you make sense of things.
• All of the operations are variations on counting. Addition is counting more; subtraction is counting backward; multiplication is counting groups; division is counting how many could go into groups; exponents are just faster multiplication, and roots are the reverse of exponents.
• Understanding place value matters.
• When you have a good sense of a number, you know how to compose it and decompose it for your convenience (e.g., sometimes when dealing with 17, we will think of it as 10+7 or 15+2 or 20-3 for easier computation).
• Likewise, shapes can often be broken down into simpler shapes for ease of understanding.
• Units matter.
• You should not ever make math cute if the cost is inaccuracy or distraction. Do not let Pinterest lead you astray here. Present concepts and examples in a way that makes sense.

Misplacing Education

One Parents' Night about eight years ago at the excellent private school where I then taught, a parent asked me an interesting question. I had explained to parents that many homework assignments would be uploaded to my class website and could be readily printed at home, and even reprinted for extra practice when students were reviewing. Mr. Y, who I believe is a businessman, expressed concern: If I put my materials online where anyone could have access to them, wasn't I giving a [very expensive private school] education away for free? Why could someone from [a different school] not just take my materials and use them?
I reassured him that there were no trade secrets in my worksheets--everything I made was, if not common knowledge, easy to find out in a book. The important part of a [name of our school] education was what happened in the classroom.
He appeared to be satisfied with my answer, but upon further reflection, I realize that it was incomplete. Mr. Y was mis-locating or mis-placing learning in written materials. This is a reasonable mistake: excellent books and other materials do make a good education much easier.
However, the imprecise answer I gave him was also misplacing education. You might suppose my reference to "what happens in the classroom" meant instruction: my explaining ideas, telling facts, and demonstrating processes. This is also a reasonable mistake, because well-thought-out instruction is likewise a valuable component of education. But if I watch you do brain surgery and you narrate what you're doing, am I a brain surgeon? If I watch the Olympics and listen to the commentary, am I an athlete?
 If I had thought better of it (which I did not with an unanticipated question and only a few minutes with that audience), I would have told him that I could likewise videotape my instruction and put that online--and still not be giving a [school name] education away! I suspect that many teachers, as well as students and parents, misplace education by thinking of it in terms of instruction.

Learning, though, is the process of developing thought and performance, of changing from an incorrect or incomplete process to a better one. To answer Mr. Y precisely, I would have had to explain to him that the education happens when I have his daughter try doing what I just showed her how to do, she gets it wrong, I talk with her to uncover the error in her thinking, we correct the error, and then she tries another example and gets it right. And of course, there is no way to replicate that without feedback, the interactions between the student and teacher that indicate what is going well and what needs improvement. There is nothing I could put on my website that would replace that process.

How else do we misplace education?

• In urban and high-poverty schools in particular, we think of discipline as education, because discipline is necessary for instruction and feedback to occur uninterrupted. Some principals like discipline enough to overlook the fact that it is not education.
• We often think of standards and curriculum as education, but it is clear that they are not--especially when standards are not met and we keep marching right on through them, year after year. This is an error that might be associated with the Common Core. Setting clear and high standards is valuable, and well-aligned curricula make teachers' work easier, but if it were that easy, American education would be very different  right now. You might say that I should be able to run an eight-minute mile, but since I can't, obviously I need more than a "should."
• We think of assessment as education, when in fact good assessment is merely an indicator that education is or is not happening (and poorly designed or administered assessment does not even do that well). This is the error of No Child Left Behind. Okay, you test my mile time and I run too slowly. (I could've told you that!) What then?
• Class size matters, but it is not education. Like discipline, small class size helps education. In a class of fourteen rather than thirty-four, I'm much more likely to notice Miss Y's error and have time to talk through the process with her.

These errors in thinking are along the lines of supposing that if you gave me a scalpel, a video of a brain surgery, a great med school textbook, and a standardized evaluation afterward, I'd be a neurosurgeon. Anybody want to sign up to be my first patient? :)