Yes, I know, I know!! Here I am again, with my beautiful clean, crisp new planner, filled with hope, dreams and success just waiting for us to fly through its pages as though they were a magic carpet ready to carry us off to homeschool/homelife glory. Ive stood here before, many times. I remember getting my first real planner in high school. The summer before ninth grade, I got to sit and write (in a nicely sharp pencil) all my subjects and their times ( first period, gym, second period, science) The best was writing in Language Arts instead of "English" wow, the big time!!!! I sat and filled it all in, filled with anticipation and the thoughts of "this will be the year". Its been -gasp- 21 years since that first brush with promised success, and I am still an addict!!
I dont know if it is the aspiration to be what I want to be, and can be, on paper? Or the freshness of the start. I LOVE a fresh start, in fact I am a fresh start addict too. Geez, I need therapy!!! Anyway, we moved a lot when I was a kid, which I LOVED! I got to change my name, take on a totally different style or personality, I loved that smell, that dance between the past and future where for a short time everything is within the present. You have no past with anyone, and no future either. You are just there.
The planner is like that too. I can stand on page one and feel the past and any "shortcomings" fall away; this is why a NEW planner is essential, nothing worse than having to erase things you never achieved. You stand there looking into the future, thinking about how you want next week to unfold, and what you hope to achieve. It is SO not how I really live my life, however it really does help me to gather my thoughts and when recording what we do and what we want to do, at some point the two come together and -sound the trumpets- SUCCESS!!!
Okay, the real reason I did this is because we are coming into a time when GM and GD's academic needs are veering apart for a while. I needed a place to record what I am trying to accomplish with each boy and a way to track it. It is easy to allow GD to not get the attention he should because he is such a happy independent worker with a more intense brother. I dont want this to happen. GD has a great year ahead of him, he is a first grader now, and with the new Enki materials becoming available I just know we will have a fun and exciting year ahead. We have done lessons with him, but mostly we have just guided how he discovers things on his own. He is a self motivated reader and writer and goodness knows I dont want to jump in there and mess the whole thing up!! So this will be our first year of really working on things with him in a way that requires planning and recording. This coupled with GM working in third grade, using a plan that I had to write myself; lets just say a gal's head can get a little cloudy!!
Next week we begin working on stuff from our new planner, I should name it something better than a planner.... I will have to think on that, maybe our dream journal. :-) I decided to give our rhythm the attention it deserves and have written out in detailed form, our morning and evening rhythms into the pages. Beth recommends this in trying to honor each thing and to work through the creating of the family habits. Once we are more solid on this (which we are pretty darn good) this will shrink to simply an entry reading "Morning Rhythm" etc... I will also write out our movement in expanded form, until we are second nature with that as well. I want this foundation to be solid before I venture off into more intricate things such as humanities for GM -vs- humanities for GD. I can jump right in there, but I have learned that without the foundation there to support me we ALL burn out and are worse off than if we had eased into the waters, building systems of support as we go. Im really looking forward to the challenge and the exciting things we will be doing this year. Albuquerque has a lot of what I want for our family, and it is all so accessable. Planning out what we are doing, and taking advantage of the community resources here should hopefully make for a great summer, and following year.
_________________________________________________________________
Ahhh, the smell of that fresh paper, and those smooth pages, with just a slight hint of cold to the touch. You have to love that moment, when all is fresh, the pencils are sharp, and the future is filled with exciting possibilities!!!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Oh, I love planners too, but I never end up using them anymore. I do most everything in Word on the computer, so I can fine tune and print out new pages and not have any cross-outs. Yes, that is one of my huge faults - I hate cross-outs. As a child I would rewrite an entire page if I made a mistake. Heck, I still do it now, though I try to stop myself. Whoever heard of soemone so obsessive that she will start a grocery list over rather than go to the store with a cross-out on her list?
LOL!!! That is pretty bad!! :-) I have it in Word too, but I need to actually write it out, I dont know, it is some sort of brain thing where the act of writing it in is so powerful. I feel less connected when I type it. However, I do often type up my grocery list! :-)
When I was planning third grade I typed it all in so I could cut and paste things that need to be moved. I could never have written all that.
Great post! You captured the planner fantasy perfectly.
My problem with planners is that I seem to forget where I put them. I would lose my head if it wasn't attached, really! Right now I just have a calendar template taped to the wall. I do my planning on that, and it seems to be working so far. At least I can find it.
Post a Comment