 Hey everybody, welcome to the Lotak Way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be a plan with me. It is back to school season and that means it is time to plan a all brand new homeschool year and I'm so excited. This is probably my favorite time of year mainly because it means planning and shopping and those are two things I love most about homeschooling. So last year during the back to school season I shared our six simple steps for big picture planning your homeschool year. If you have not seen that video yet I highly recommend you check it out first. So I'm gonna link it right here for you guys because that is going to be for the most part the steps that we're going to be taking today together while you plan with me to plan this upcoming homeschool year. Now the first thing I do when it is time to plan is I pull out my grade level checklist. These are the skills in math and language arts that I say should be mastered by grade level should remember that we homeschool that can be flexible your kid doesn't have to be on target there's no such thing as behind. So what I like to do is I like to pull out the previous grade, the current grade and the next grade level so that I have a little bit of everything to look at. So for us, since Emily is going to be going into fifth grade that means I'm going to be pulling out the fourth grade, the fifth grade and the sixth grade skills to look at. The next thing I pull out after I've pulled those out is just the actual planning page which is the skills checklist and of course some of my favorite erasable pens. They're absolutely amazing when it comes to homeschooling so if you don't have some I suggest you get them because erasable pens are amazing. So the first thing I do as I look at the grade that we just came out of. So for example, I'm gonna start going through the skills. The first one is identify the main events of the plot, discussed character traits and motivations. I believe Emily's mastered that one so I'm not gonna put that on my list because I don't think we need to focus on that this school year. Next up we have define elements of figurative language. We did do a little bit with that last year. We did not master it however so I am going to add figurative language to my list here. That's something I want to focus on this school year. Use a variety of sources to obtain information. I think she's very, very good at that however I am going to put research on my list so we can focus on researching, compiling those resources into something that we can use like a report. So I'm just gonna keep going through all of fourth grade first. Then I'm gonna move to fifth grade and then if I feel like I do not have enough in math and language arts I will look at sixth grade. That does not, well actually I'm just gonna, that's never happened in math. Math is not something Emily has ever ahead in if we will. It might happen in language arts though so I'm going to just finish that out for language arts and math. I try to keep language arts on one side of the page and math on the other so I can distinctively see how full each subject is getting and then I'll make some other notes for myself as well. Simple overview of the skills that I really know that I wanna work on with her this year. So we have things like figurative language, researching, exploring different genres, practicing debating, working on poetic forms, the different types of forms, how to do them, writing them ourselves, outlines when it comes to writing so how to properly outline what you want to write and then working on different forms of writing. So personal writing, narrative writing, all just different kinds of writing that will also come into play with like our mail time and our journaling. So personal writing and writing letters and just kind of working on writing in general. And then for math, I have fractions galore because we really need to dive deep into fractions, understanding them, adding them, subtracting them, multiplying them, dividing them. The equivalent fractions, just really all things fractions, perimeter and area, volume and measurement as well as the metric measurements as well. Money, I really wanna focus on making change and not just making simple change but making change up to like if somebody was to hand you a hundred dollar bill being able to make change without a calculator and I want her to be fast at it. So that's something I wanna work on with her time zones. We worked on them a little bit this year. I want her to understand not just how they work but especially in the United States, I feel like when somebody says even me as an adult when somebody is like, I'm at PST, I'm like, wait, what is that? And then I have to like look up the conversion. I want her to know, like, okay, my friend lives in California, that's three hours behind me. So if it's 3 p.m. here, it's 12 there. Like I just want her to be able to know that and not have to look it up every single time. So I wanna work on that a little bit more. Angles and so like we're talking about triangles and angles in general, decimals and percentages and being able to convert them back and forth easily and work with them without being scared of them. And then ratios. So that is the start of my list. Now, if we manage to conquer all of this and let's say the first three or four months, then I will go back to the checklist and I will add more to it. But this is a really, really great place for me to start. It gives me a really good idea of the things that I need to have on hand to teach the concepts that I want to teach her for her fifth grade year. So now that I've done that, the next thing I would typically do is choose our one thing for this school year. Now that would mean a family meeting, which we have already had previous to us filming this video. But that means us sitting down together. Typically, Kevin and I sit down together first and we discuss maybe options for our one thing. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, every school year we choose one thing to be the focus of that school year. So in previous years, we've chosen read alouds, poetry, tea time, art. Last year we chose field trips. I find that when you focus on one thing for a whole school year, when you really make it a priority, it becomes a habit and you no longer have to go out of your way to do it. So by the end of the school year it has found its way to kind of like live in your home school year and then you can focus on something else. So like now we're really good at read alouds and we're really good at games and we're really good at making poetry or tea time happen and we're great at making room in our home school for field trips. So this year, Kevin and I discussed a few things as Emily is getting older and then we presented her with the few that we discussed and our one thing this school year is going to be logic and critical thinking. I am not the best at making room for that in our home school, although I know the importance of it. So I will be making room for it this year. We've seen I guess the need for it, especially as she's getting older as her brain is developing more and because I know that we're only going to be getting into more and more complex mathematics like algebraic thinking. And I know that critical thinking and logical thinking will help her with that. So we're trying to kind of help her on that way and not make algebra later on as scary as it could potentially be for her. While also giving her what we feel like is a much needed skill when it comes to logic and critical thinking. So I'm also going to make a note of that just somewhere on my checklist just so that I know that the thing that we're focusing on this year is logic and critical thinking because that's one thing that I need to make sure I'm remembering. And so now that I know what our one thing is and I know what our concepts are, I am going to take this checklist that I made and I am basically going to go inventory our home school resources. I'm going to see what games we have on hand, what books we have on hand, what manipulatives we have on hand, what things do I have already in my possession that will help us achieve these, you know, mastering these things? Like do I have things that will help us achieve mastering figurative language? Do I have things that will help us achieve mastering fractions? Do I have enough logical and critical thinking things on hand? Now I'm going to have a lot of things on hand but I'm also going to want to add a lot of things too. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to go inventory our shelves, see what we have, figure out what I need more of or what I don't need any more of and then we'll go from there. I'm writing my shelves which means that this is my absolute favorite part. The next thing I get to do is shop. So I've just kind of taken my checklist and I went and looked at the shelves. I know what I have on hand. I have quite a bit of logic and critical thinking stuff. I have some stuff for fractions. I have some stuff actually for almost all of this but I did make a few little notes saying, okay, this is what you need more of. Some of the fractions things I have are a little like a simple and I need some more advanced things for us to be able to master this. So I now know what I need or what I would like. Let me put it that way because that's what we tell Emily to say for us to be able to master these concepts. So my next step is to shop which is my absolute favorite. So I'm going to shop some of my favorite places, Amazon, Rambo Resources, Usborne Scholastic. This year I'm also adding Mindwear in because they have a lot of logic and critical thinking stuff. That's pretty much it. That's what I do. It's super simple. I do it normally in less than a day. I just sit down, I say, okay, this is the day we're gonna do it. I'm gonna pick the things that we're gonna be mastering this year, what we're gonna be working on. We discuss our one thing. I go through an inventory, everything that I have on hand or that I would like to purchase. In addition, I shop. Now shopping might take me more than one day because I like to wait for primed day and try to get the best sales and the best discounts but pretty much I have my carts set up everywhere of all of the things that I want. And then I check out whenever I get the best deal. So when like short learning sends me a discount or something like that. And that's it. That is how I set up for our homeschool year. After everything comes in, the last thing I'm gonna do is purge through all of the things that we no longer need. And then that'll be it. We'll be ready to start fifth grade. So if you want to see all of the things that I bought to set us up for an amazing fifth grade homeschool year, if you're excited for back to school hauls, make sure you're subscribed and click that little bell so you'll be notified when all of the back to school haul videos go live next week.