Daily Choice List

I'm not one to stick to a routine.  We do have some structure around here, but I also value the option to totally stray from the schedule on a whim.  With homeschool, that translates into us flying-by-the-seat-of-our-pants and learning/doing whatever sounds good or fits in that moment.  I don't do lesson plans.  I just have good curriculum and great resources available that we can grab at a moment's notice.  (The exception: morning calendar and journal time before breakfast.  This one doesn't get messed with very often.)

But I have noticed in the past couple weeks that Primus is hungry for something more predictable.  She needed a clear plan of what was expected of her each day.  So I determined that on average, we do 8 tasks a day.  A task could be a worksheet completed, or book read, or activity done. 

Primus must complete 8 tasks in the day before she can have her media time allowance (fake money we made to limit TV and video game time.)  She keeps track of this by putting little stickers in my lesson plan book where I write down what we did.

To accompany this new structure, I made up a list of general tasks that we could do on any given day.  This list is posted on our bulletin board.  She knows that I will choose our assignments from here, and that she can have some say throughout the day on what she is interested in doing.

The second list is Fun Stuff that she can do pretty independently that would also count as a task.  She can pick only one or two things from this list to do each day.

So far, this method is working well.  This afternoon I asked Primus to pick something from the list and she knew right away that she wanted to do animal science.  Great!  We hadn't done any science in a couple days so that was a good idea.  So we sat down with our Evan Moore curriculum and completed 3 science activities. 

This is going to be the perfect balance for us.  I can still be relaxed about routine while giving Primus a clear goal of how many things must be completed before school is "over" for the day.  And I can still reserve the right to decide at the last minute what needs to be done, while giving Primus some feeling of control as she gets to choose a few things that interest her at the moment.