I’m a control freak. Combine that with a history of curriculum writing jobs and homeschooling and, well, I’m sure you can use your imagination.
What I love about the Classical Conversations Curriculum Guide is that is gives me a framework around which to build my week. For instance, the first week’s history memory sentence for 2011’s cycle (happens to be Cycle 3) happens to be about Columbus so our history activities will revolved around Columbus. The fall semester of Cycle 3 focuses on anatomy so we’re moving through My Body
I sat down last night and started planning in detail. I’ve been getting to know Microsoft’s OneNote application and you should too. The best part? Microsoft (I’m sure feeling pressure from Google) now offers the majority of their Office suite free online.
Even if you’re not designing your own curriculum, this is a great tool for organizing your thoughts, life, lesson plans from pre-packaged curriculum, etc. It’s basically sectioned spiral notebooks on your computer.
To get started, go to http://office.live.com.
Sign up if you don’t have a Live account or a hotmail account.
Once you sign in, you’ll see a screen kinda like this:
Click on the purple OneNote application on the right. See red arrow above.
You can add as many notebooks as you want (they run on the left side). Each notebook can have as many sections or dividers as you want (they run on the top). Each section has pages (see the right side).
I have a notebook for each child this year. Each notebook is divided into sections according to subject. Each section has a page for each week. I have a table on each page that has 4 or 5 days running down one column and my lesson plan or activity in a corresponding column. OneNote also gives you the ability to type virtually anywhere so you can see I have notes off to the side. One of my favorite parts is that when you paste text from a website, it automatically footnotes a reference for you. You can also paste documents, emails, or images.
Go ahead try it and let me know what you think!