Back in the box: updates on Dollygirl's Grade 7 plans (updated)

Those of you who have followed along here know I have been posting (and revising) Dollygirl's September school plans on a separate page.  Like I said before, it's mostly Ambleside Online's Year Seven, but wearing a vintage dress:  substituting the P.U.S. English and French history books for Churchill's Birth of Britain, and experimenting a bit with the literature list.  I had a list of the books to use for those subjects, but hadn't gotten down to figuring out exactly how or when.

I'm also revisiting some materials that the Apprentice used in middle school, things I wasn't sure if we'd ever use again:  a first edition copy of Apologia General Science (Ponytails used that too), a second edition Saxon Algebra 1/2, and a 1999 set of Power Glide French (we hope our cassette player holds out).  All these books, the Apprentice used successfully at around Dollygirl's age, so knowing that inspires some confidence that they'll be good choices again.  One important note:  for all three of those, we'll plan on doing only the first half of the book. 

But this is the big change I'm working on.  Dollygirl still has the workboxing chart I made for her four years ago, and she asked me if we would ever be doing workboxing again.  I said no, probably not.  It worked well with our homeschooling situation that year, but that was then, this is now.  I thought about it some more, and wondered if anybody out there was even still using workboxes.  I browsed around and found this post on Hope for Homeschool: a no-busywork, simple workboxing setup and routine for middle school and up.   You don't even have to load the boxes every night or have every page number pre-scheduled; for older kids who are basically using the same books day after day, you can just check what they've accomplished (or they can) and record it on a planner page.  In which case I guess you don't call it a planner page, it's a checker page or a journal page, but whatever.

That was exactly...well, almost exactly...what we needed, for two reasons.  First,  the physical side of it made sense (although we will use Ponytails' old plastic magazine holder system instead of drawers).  We don't have a lot of floor space for drawers, or racks of shoeboxes, but we do have a cabinet where the books can be shut away when school's done.  Second, thinking of subjects in "boxes" forces me to simplify or at least nail down what we're doing.  The Hope for Homeschool family use Sonlight Curriculum, but that's easy enough to translate into our more-or-less Ambleside Online plans.

Besides the box system, I also like Merry's teacher box (I have one of those giant Easy Grammar Plus teacher's manuals too) and teacher binder.  They're really not that different from organizing tools we've used in the past, but her photos are giving me a bit of extra inspiration for the coming year.

I've updated the Grade 7 Plans page to reflect the workboxing additions.

Dollar-store stuff to make workbox charts

Something we did this morning: used some of the stuff I bought to make workbox "laminated" number cards and completed-work charts. I can't really take a picture (or maybe I could and blur part of it?) because the girls' first names are prominent. But here's what we did:

I went to the Workboxes Yahoo group where there are a lot of files uploaded with fancy number sets. Most of them are too fancy for us because we have only a black-and-white printer; so we settled for number-plus-happy-face, one set printed out on yellow (surplus store) cardstock for Crayons, and one set on blue for Ponytails. I cut those out and covered them in (dollar-store) clear sticky plastic (wow, you don't get much on a roll these days!--the tags took most of the roll).

I cut a 14-inch square of blue (dollar-store) posterboard and one of yellow, and arranged the numbers on each one. Then the girls used (dollar-store) scrapbooking alphabet stickers to put their names at the top, and used some of their own favourite stickers to jazz them up around the edges. Finally I put (dollar-store) Velcro (or hook-and-loop fastener if you prefer) dots on the back of the plastic-covered numbers, and on the places on the charts where the numbers go, and attached them together. If we had decided to plastic-cover the charts themselves, I would have done that first, but we decided that the poster-board charts were about as durable as we needed them to be. (Besides, most of the plastic was gone.)

I ran a strip of weird, gooey, double-sided foam scrapbooking tape (dollar store) along the back of each chart, and attached them inside the doors of the cupboard where their (dollar-store) magazine holder-workboxes will be. If you're ever doing something like this, just check to see that any raised areas (like pieces held on with Velcro) go BETWEEN the shelves, not against them. I got one chart hung too high and the door wouldn't close right, so I had to start again. (And that tape was kind of messy to get off the cupboard door.)

I had two 16-dot packs of Velcro dots, which gave us enough for the charts (12 apiece) plus eight of the prickly-side dots to put on the magazine holders. I need to buy another package of dots to get enough for the other ten holders. If the math on that doesn't add up, it's because there's room on each shelf for only nine magazine holders, so that's how many workboxes each girl will have. However, we went with numbers 1-12 on the charts, just in case and to accommodate things like an extra-reading basket.

If the purpose of all this isn't clear by now (and I'm not even sure if the girls totally get it yet), Mama Squirrel loads the boxes/magazine holders with work each night. (Some of our boxes won't change from day to day, some will.) The Velcro numbers go on the boxes in the morning. As the work in the boxes gets completed, the numbers get put back on the completed-work chart. When the chart's full, school's done. (I know learning happens all the time, but you know what I mean--the assigned, scheduled work is completed.)

That isn't exactly the way Sue Patrick's system works. But that's how we're going to try it for now.