 Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach Way. I'm Jessica, and today's video is going to be a homeschool show and tell. The homeschool show and tell is an open collaboration hosted by Abby from Rudin and Rest and myself. Our goal with the homeschool show and tell was really just to show that there's not one right way to homeschool. And we do that by bringing a group of homeschoolers together from around the world each and every month to share their take on a different topic. This month's topic is homeschool planning, and I am so excited about it because I am not the world's best planner. In fact, I rarely plan. I'm going to show you today what planning would look like in an ideal world, but I'm excited to see what other people do for homeschool planning and maybe get some ideas and tips and tricks. So if you want to get some of those same ideas, tips and tricks, make sure you check out the playlist that I'm going to link in the description box so that you can watch all of the videos of everybody participating along with us. Okay, without further ado, let's jump into planning. Like I said, I am not the world's biggest planner. I like to leave a lot of flexibility in our homeschool days to make sure that I am leaving room to follow her interest and just kind of chase whatever leads she may be coming interested or curious about. That being said, our days do have kind of a rhythm or a routine to them, and I shared about that recently. So I'm going to leave a link up here at the eye in the sky of our homeschool routine if you would like to see what our days look like. Now the first thing I do when I sit down to plan is I get whatever kind of like curriculum-y things that we're using at the time, which right now is our handwriting, our unit study, and then I have my computer to be able to pull up her math. I also have my phone, so I can look at our schedule on my calendar. I have my Waldog Way planner, and then I have some erasable pens because that is kind of cute when you are doing homeschool planning, at least in my opinion. Now the first thing that I'm going to do is write down the week of, which it is the week of October 31st that we're planning for. And then I'm going to check my phone to see what we have going on this week because I really like to be realistic with our time and my expectations. So things that are time, things that cannot change, that cannot move, that can't do anything, I write that down first. Like what are the things that we have to be at at a certain time? So this coming week, that is a Lego class on Wednesday and a book club on Thursday. I'm also going to make a note that Monday is Halloween so that I don't forget. Now we only plan, or I only plan, for a four-day school week. While we may school five days a week, some weeks, I don't plan for that because that's in a perfect world. Planning for four days a week gives me room to move things to another day. It kind of gives us a day to make up. It gives me flexibility. It gives me all of this extra. And since we school year-round anyway, it just seems to make sense. If, which this does not happen very often, but if we were to complete everything that I had kind of chosen for us to do, like let's say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and we had all of it done on Friday, then I would just have a game school day all day on Friday because well, we did everything. And so that's kind of what I like to do. So the first thing that I do after I've written, you know, what's going on for the week is I look at the week and I'm like, okay, let's be realistic. We have two online classes happening and Monday is a holiday. So I just told you that I plan for a four-day school week. I'm also going to go ahead and tell you that we're not gonna homeschool regularly on Monday. It's Halloween. So normally I would do this part at the end, but we're gonna do it at the beginning since it's Monday. So this is kind of special. At the very bottom of my planner, I always write games and I choose a handful of games I would like to see us play that week. Now, a lot of the times it will be based off of either things that I think Emily needs, some refresher on, things she needs practice on, things that we're studying, but this week it's going to be Halloween games and that's what we're gonna do for Monday for homeschool because it's Halloween. So we're gonna have a Halloween game school day. So I've already pulled the games. So that we can write them down. I have a stack of them anyway. The first one is Absolute Dice, which is one of our favorite. So I'm going to write that on here. And now just because I write it doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna play it. I just like keeping a list of the games I would like to see us play. This one will definitely be played Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza Halloween Edition. That's Emily's absolute favorite game. She will pick it almost every single time. Let's see. Spot it. That's also one I know that we're gonna play because she loves it so much. This is one we haven't played yet. So hopefully we'll get to play it. Hocus Pocus Tricks and Wits. So it's a card game. So let's hope that we get to that one. We have Potions, which is a wizard game. It's not really Halloween, but we always play it at Halloween time. We play it all the time, but we play it extra this time of year. We have the other Hocus Pocus game. So I will add that one to the list as well. And let's see, we have Goosebumps. That was loud, sorry. We have Goosebumps, the board game. We have Disney's The Haunted Mansion. And last but not least, the Return of the Headless Horseman. So I'm just gonna write Headless Horseman. Okay. So like I said, I would do that kind of at the end of my planning session, but I already know that Monday is Halloween and we're not going to be doing any actual school. So I'm just gonna go ahead and get that done. Now, I don't always normally pull every game off the shelf. I just did that because I knew you guys would wanna see them. But I write down games I would like to see us play during that week kind of at the bottom of my planner. So I have an idea and I don't have to have one of those moments where we could play a game if I just knew what we wanted to play. This also gives me a chance to refresh myself on any rules if I don't remember how a game was played kind of before the week starts. That way when we have the time we can just sit down and jump right into playing. So that's kind of another one of my, I guess, game school tips. Okay, so now that I know that I'm going to start with what I'm going to strew with her every day. Strewing is something that really sets our home school up for success because it really gives her a way to kind of start being curious and interested in something. And fire her brain and get everything started without me having to engage first thing in the morning when I'm not ready to people yet. Lately she's really been enjoying single player logic games. And I happen to know off the top of my head which her favorites are. So I'm just going to go ahead and write one of those down for each day. So that's going to be rush hour, balance beans, hoppers, which are adorable little hopping frogs. And cat crimes. Now these all happen to be think fun games. In case you want to know some more single player logic games, I will link a blog post in the description for you with all of our favorites. So each of these have like 60 challenge cards and they get harder and harder. And so she's been able to do these for a really long time and just keep trying to get harder and harder with them. So that's what I'm going to strew. Sometimes she might play one for a couple of days but I like having an idea of what I'm going to strew because then I can just look and go, oh yeah, that's what I was going to pull out. And I don't have to try to think when I'm really exhausted the night before. Then after that, I like to plan what I would like her to do in an ideal world for her independent learning time, which is kind of when we're getting ready in the morning for the day. Typically, and like I said, in an ideal world I would have her do one page of her cursive handwriting and one teaching textbooks lesson. Again, that might not always happen but we're going to write it down anyway. So for handwriting, let's see, she's going to do page 52, page 53, page 54, and page 55. And then for teaching textbooks, which is why I have my laptop out so I can see where she's at, she's going to do lesson 36, lesson 37, lesson 38, and lesson 39. Okay, so now I have what we're going to strew, what she's going to do independently. So then this is going to be super silly but after that in our routine we would do our morning basket which happens in the afternoon. And so I like to put that on here because I like to be able to check things off. I really, really, really like to check things off. And we may not get to anything else but I know that basket time is going to happen no matter what every day. So even on a really, really bad day if I put it on here, I'm still going to be able to check something off. So that's what I'm going to do. So I just like to literally write basket time and like I said, that's just because I'm type A and I like to check boxes that I do that because I know that that's the one thing we're going to do every day no matter what it's going to happen because that's just part of our life. And if I write it down, I get to check that box. And then after that is normally her table time with me and so that's typically some sort of lesson that can look really, really different every day. I know that she is going to want to journal about Halloween. So I'm going to put journaling on day one because that's probably going to be Tuesday. And then before I do anything else I'm going to look in our unit study, which is Greek myths and see what that is going to be going on for this week. Nine. The activity for that week is a writing prompt. So I'm actually going to put that on day two because I'm not going to ask her to do a writing prompt and journal on the same day. Like I said, I like to be realistic with my expectations and that would just be pulling teeth to ask her to write that much. So that's what I'm going to put on day two. And then on day three, I'm going to put her research page for that week's goddess and on day four, I actually had this idea when we were reading Percy Jackson the other day, they were talking about haikus in the book that we were reading. So we are going to learn about haikus, maybe read some examples and write our own. So that is what we're going to do for mine and her time together on each of the four days. I'm going to keep it short and sweet because again, it's a holiday week. I mean, I'm just not going to push things. And then like I said, if we're saying that Monday is going to be a game school day and we know that she has Lego on Wednesday and Thursday, then that leaves Tuesday and Friday open. So I'm just going to write steam with dad on both of those days and it will happen on one of the two. He will pick which day is better for him. And if it's a really, really fantastic week, he might do it with her twice. That doesn't happen very often. So we will just see, but I'm going to write that down because it will happen on one of those two days for him and her to do one of their subscription boxes together. If you would like to know more about what they do for steam, why he decided to teach that and what he uses for that, I will leave a link in the description box that he wrote a blog post all about steam in our home school. So I will leave that for you there. And then realistically, that's it. This would normally be the time when I would pick whatever games I wanted for the week, but we did that in the beginning. And so this is it for the week. This is pretty much all I do. I keep kind of a very generic, this is what I would like to see us get done. And then you will see that I have plenty of extra room, like four to five lines per day. And so I can always add more if we've done more. So like if we watch a documentary, I can jot that down. If maybe Kevin and Emily do a box on a day that I didn't have it on there, I could jot that down. And again, I use a raceable pen so I can erase anything that we actually don't do on those days. That's really it. I'm very, very basic in what I do. I try to keep very generic idea of what I would like to get done in an ideal world. And I like to have a list of games like this that we could potentially play if we have the time to play them. But now I would love it if you would tell me what your homeschool planning process looks like. Do you plan day by day? Do you plan by the week? I know a lot of people who do like Sabbath planning, so I plan six weeks at a time. I would love it if you would tell me down in the comments. How do you plan for your homeschool and how detailed are you?