Plans and counter-plans

Plans and counter-plans

by smunkybee @ 2010-09-06 – 02:09:41

Am I lesson planning here? I think I may be. We’ve decided to give a more structured approach a go for a while. The children (my daughter and her friend who spends 2 days a week with us) seem to like it and were involved in drawing up the timetable. This is abundantly obvious from the fact that it includes things like "“bounce on trampoline” and “watch tv”. It does also include things like science, maths, history and geography. The inclusion of geography was great. L, Hannah’s friend, asked to include it, watch me writing it down on the list and paused for a moment before adding “actually, what is geography???”

Having the timetable seems to focus the girls and they appear very motivated by looking at it on the wall and knowing what comes next (who knew that would happen…I’ve never been convinced by the advocates of routines for babies who said “babies need to know what comes next!” My daughter never needed to know what came next; she just needed to know I was near!)

Sometimes we even stick to it. But the great beauty of our timetable as opposed to a school one is that a teacher has no freedom to look at the weather forecast and decide that maths and geography can both be covered by a trip to the beach. We looked at maps to work out the nearest beach, calculated distances and time required, discovered the different types of beach offered by moving short distances along the same stretch of coast…job done. And digging and bodyboarding pretty much covers PE!

And although we have this outline of areas to cover and as now, I come up with ideas I think will be fun and enjoyable, I’m completely happy to facilitate what they want to do. If they get engrossed in a project, they won’t have to stop because it’s “time” to do something else now. Hannah has asked if we can go to the forest tomorrow so we will, abandoning history and art for tree climbing and pond dipping.

But at the moment I am planning something to do with maps for tomorrow for geography, investigations with Hannah’s new microscope for science or maybe we’ll ditch the plan in favour of making jam!