What will you do differently next year?
Throughout May, we talked about how to reflect on the past year school year to help inform the next one. Did you miss those? You can catch up here:
Now that you have some data to work with, it's time to put it all together and make some adjustments for next year. If it's overwhelming to look at everything at once, consider categorizing. You might try
Schedules and routines
Family studies
Individual studies
I'm still working on this myself, but I know a few adjustments we'll make next year. First, my eldest loves foreign languages and has requested to add French in the mix, which I am happy to do. We'll get either Babbel or Rosetta Stone to help with that. (Have you used one of these programs before? I'd love to hear feedback on how well it did - or didn't - work.) Also, my eldest is hoping to take an additional class with the local school, so we may be sacrificing some freedom in our scheduling. Freedom to follow our own schedule is one of my top perks for homeschooling, so I'm a little nervous to relinquish some control over this, but I also want to encourage my child to try new things, so we'll see how it goes!
After assessing the year, I want to structure more of our science and history lessons for next year. I like the flexibility of progressing along at our own pace, but I fell short in my own expectations for these courses last year, and I'm disappointed mostly with myself.
On the positive side, the extracurricular activities we chose were great fits for my kids. And while I think my eldest will need additional time to do school work (as the kids get older, it's only natural that the work is more demanding), we all appreciate our late starts, so we'll see if we can continue that next year.
How about you? What are you keeping? What are you switching?
