In this short time, I have tweaked the schedules so many different ways to suit our family. All of which were completely unnecessary. Over time, I've made scheduling sheets for each child, I've added readers, science curriculum, geography books, a Bible curriculum, and who knows what else, making it so much harder than it really needs to be.
I have prayed and prayed that the Good Lord would cover our homeschool journey and fill in the gaps that I couldn't see. I have a terrible time seeing the big picture of things. I am so focused on the now that the end result tends to escape me. I know it's there, I have an idea of what I want but I fail in seeing how it's accomplished.
That is until I started working on my "Birds Eye View" chart. I created a matrix of AO years 1-12 using excel. I've only completed years 1-4 so far and I'm already discovering how the Advisory has intricately woven this curriculum together. I will trust that AO is enough. As a result of this leap of faith, our days have grown simpler.
In the spirit of simplicity, I've done away with the long detailed sheets, the check boxes, the extra readers, and the external curriculum supplements. I now have one page in my BUJO dedicated to the weekly overview of what needs to be accomplished!Buying the heavy-weight paper required for my disc planner is more expensive than washi tape, so I just print on regular paper and then tape it in place.
I love this format, for my weekly dashboard. I can see at a glance what needs to be accomplished. If I miss something it's easily traveled to the next day. This works for me. In between each week (the back side of these pages) are my bullet lists for the day. I had a downloaded and shrunk version of the 36-week schedule in the back of my journal but I now work directly from the AO site. I've found I had been missing some great tidbits and helps in the weekly lists making things unnecessarily harder.
Next will be a simple list for the kids to work through. My youngest is reading now, which makes it easier. This will also point them in the direction of being independent learners and self-starters, I hope!
