Lesson Planning

I have spent hours and hours and hours in the past weeks readying my lessons for the next two terms.  We're switching evermore to a Charlotte Mason approach, but I still want to present the Waldorf material.  This has been hard for me to figure out, and I am afraid I will just overwhelm the children with too many things.  The nice thing about a lesson plan is I can see at a glance how much each of them has in a day and then my "lesson" can be sifted around their other work.

The Miquon math has been a wonderful confidence builder for both children.  Ezra already liked math, but it's like the Miquon really helped him step into the unknown.  For Phaedra, she refuses to accept that she might know something until she definitely knows it.  The Miquon presents little bite size lessons that she barely has time to resist before the lesson is over.  So, quite suddenly, she knows how to do something new.

The other math program we're using is more thorough and more challenging.  Ezra will definitely switch to that exclusively next year, but I'm tempted to still do a blended curriculum for Phaedra.  I like seeing how sure she is of the things she's learned with Miquon.  I find it so strange that these very mathematical children get balky around math; I take it as a clear sign that I have not presented it well up to this point.  It's the main reason I am trying these curricula.

I can see a definite uptick in the reading over the next two terms.  It's built into the Charlotte Mason work.  Additionally, since we're have shorter terms, some of the history reading is collapsed, two weeks into one.  Ezra is a fast reader, and I share Phaedra's reading with her whenever she wants me to, so it's not a big deal.   It does mean school might take us a bit longer each day.  We needed to do this so we could go to Texas and still finish with school before we were too far into summer.

I am using some verses written to play with language for some of their copywork this term.  For the next term, I am relying more on the poetry they will already be reading. I also included specific German lessons, handwork, and physical education work on my lesson plan so I will not as easily let these things slide.  For the record, we do many different art lessons as part of the Waldorf curriculum as well as the art included in the Charlotte Mason curriculum.

Things I am looking forward to:
Sharing the Jataka tales with Phaedra.
Ezra's Norse comic strip.
Playing the flute for Sylvie.
Introducing Ezra to calligraphy and Phaedra to cursive.
Learning some new fingerplays with Sylvie.
Working with mixed fractions with Ezra, and using polygons to introduce them.
Seeing Phaedra's reaction to some of the Saints stories.