Week Two Modifications

Welcome to week two and we're already modifying. Ah, but this year I'm ahead of the game, I planned for modifications!! I knew it would happen. That's me staying just a mm ahead of the game.

I'm a planner by nature and have looked at many scenarios for our upcoming years (yes plural). I've been attracted to a modified block schedule for high school. My plan is to spread out the subjects into Blocks A, B, and C. A is Mon/Wed, B is Tues/Thurs, C is Friday. Will it work? I don't know.

I wasn't sure we would need it this year, but as it stands we're going to try it. In fourth grade I felt like we rushed through our day, revolving through subjects like an obstacle course. The end of the day felt like the end of a race, we were winded and worn. Fifth and sixth grade were better as we moved away from doing so much. Sadly, although I planned each subject well, this first week had some of the same rush to it and I could feel myself getting a little tense by the end of the day. Z is doing more written work this year and I feel like we need to allot more time for some subjects.

Block scheduling will allow us to savor our time. At least that's the plan. We will still get through all of our subjects as necessary. I'm only dropping one item, which was a stretch anyway. Latin Fairy Tales. We were going to loosely go through and translate them. However I see it will be too much of a leap for Z's abilities, too much work for me, and in the end would be busy work. We shall return to them later, like a year or two from now.

I'm also working on adding some chapter reviews for Latin Alive!. I think these will be good for his retention. My goal is that it will show him how to summarize a chapter in a text.

So that is our modifications for this week. We're going to give the new schedule at least two weeks and then re-evaluate.