From Fall to Winter and Trying to Keep Up!

Here in Colorado we like dramatic changes, especially when it comes to the weather.  We can be enjoying 80 degree weather when it's close to Halloween, like the day we took our trip to Anderson Farms (notice the short sleeves).

And we can go from raking leaves on a beautiful day in November like this….

…to having the temperature plummet by 70 degrees and shoveling snow in the next couple of days like this…

Needless to say, you never want to completely pack away either your cold-weather nor your warm-weather clothes, because you never know what you might be wearing within the next few days.

In the midst of such unpredictability it's nice to try to have a handle on something in your daily life.  One of the areas of life that I try to keep organized is that of our homeschool planning.  Here is my main tool for keeping organized….

It is simply a yearly calendar.  But, without it, I'd be lost!  I look to it each and everyday to see what it is I'd like to accomplish with Penny.  It's not set in stone.  We often change things up.  In fact, my calendar  typically has lots of arrows directing you to different days, as we change the days when we actually tackle the assignments.  It looks something like this in a typical week…

You'll notice, too, how I highlight the different classes with different colored highlighters.  That way, I quickly can see which class it refers to.  In the very front of the calendar I have taped in my go-to plan of what curriculum I'd been planning to use for the various subject areas I want us to study.  In that master plan, the different courses are also highlighted with the particular subjects, according to color. 

That way, throughout our three-and-a-half years of homeschooling, we have always referred to certain subject areas with certain colors.  It's quite helpful, as even Penny has learned how to quickly find which subjects she needs to study on certain days.  She knows how to grab my teacher's planner and check, for herself, what she needs to study, say on the days when I'm working at the church and am busy packing lunches and haven't had time to write down her assignments for the day.  There are five main different colors, designated for the general subject areas of:  English, Math, Social Studies, Science and Bible.  On my shelving, in our homeschool room, I have six totes for textbooks (including those five subject areas and one for the teacher ).

Those, too, are labeled, but not color-coded.  I'm not quite that OCD!  What I typically do on a day when I'm working, outside of the home, is to grab the teacher's tote and put all of my teacher textbooks in it, to haul along with me to work.  That way, on my lunch break, or during a slow time at work, I can pull out my teacher's planner and books and do a little grading or planning.  Penny knows when I have my lunch break, and will typically call me at those times with any questions she has about the homework assignments that I've given her for the day.  We only have to do this two days per week.  The other three days I am at home or once every other week, she's at work with me, after her homeschool enrichment group.  Those are the days that we typically schedule the harder subjects, like Math and Science.  It's a system that has ended up working really well for us.

What are some ways that you have learned to bring some order to your "constantly-changing" everyday life?