The Best Laid (Lesson) Plans

I'm definitely conflicted this time of year. Despite 16 years having passed since fall meant a return to school, fall means a fresh start. New notebooks, paper, and binders. Anticipation, both enthused and anxious about new classes. And, notably, unlike the rest of life, a beginning with a definite ending in sight.

About this time every year, I find myself surrounded by scrawled lists of curriculum plans and piles of books. I've planned in notebooks, on calenders, on computer-generated planner pages, and in my head, all with moderate initial success that diminished come October or so, where recording what we actually did took the place of planning what we would do. That's fine for my younger guy, since he generally takes us further than I would have planned, but with my older at age 12 (7th grade age), it's really not enough for either of us. I need to know that a course will get finished in the span of our school year. He needs a path to follow with signposts telling him how far he's been and how far there is to go. He needs me to make a plan.

So here I am, surrounded by the papers and the books, slowly scheduling out Geometry, Latin, Biology, and more. I'm trying out some scheduling software this time around, Homeschool Tracker Plus, and (as I was warned) the learning curve has been fairly steep. It allows homeschoolers to share lesson plans with others, which can be quite the time saver, but I'm not sure that time savings will be evident this year, given the amount of work I've put in learning how to make the program work best for me and my family. I'm not one to schedule down to the hour, and that seems to be one of the program's strengths. Right now, my favorite feature is the library function. With a swipe of my neutered Cue Cat (bar code reader turned ISBN reader), I can catalogue my books. Using the resource function, I can sort these by course as well. Hooray! It's too soon to tell if this software will meet my needs, but the latent librarian in me is deeply satisfied.

Religious Tolerance and the Crusades

This morning began slowly, partially out of cold-winter morning inertia, partially due to my weekend lesson-planning and work-checking avoidance measures, which were highly successful. After checking my older's math, we sat down together over my cup of coffee to discuss his weekly work on his Connect the Thoughts Religious Intolerance unit study (http://www.connectthethoughts.net/upper--current-events.php#course-21677). Four the last four weeks, he's studied definitions of religion, information about a variety of belief systems, and the general issue of religious intolerance.

The study ends with an exploration of the United Nations' declaration on elimination of religious intolerance, a sweeping document challenging countries to speak and act with respect to those of all belief systems. We spent about twenty minutes discussing the ramifications of befriending a country intolerant to other religions and possible ways to avoid war when neighboring countries have opposing views on religion. While we didn't solve the world's problems, we had meaningful dialogue about the issues, starting at the level of individuals, gradually moving to communities and nations. The course complements his world religions study at our UU as well, a big plus.

While my older and I were having a fairly erudite conversation about the advantages of religious tolerance, my younger built a costume from duct tape and fleece for his passion of the week: the Crusades. The day brought us his incarnation of a Teutonic knight, complete with armor and shield. His outfit was his own design, and it shows the versalitity of duct tape as well as his creative side. Toward the end of the costume making, he asked, "Why do the crusaders wear all those crosses?" Somehow he missed the crux of the events -- religious intolerance. I reviewed the basics again (my version being why the wars were fought in the first place), he nodded in understanding and then proceeded to his reinactment portion of the program. Obviously our conversations are just beginning.