Timetabling

"Topic" was for Science, PE, History, Geography, Music etc.

This was my first attempt at making a timetable. Looks familiar? Yes, it's pretty similar to a class timetable. Does a class timetable, which is used for up to 32 children, work at home for only one child? It can. Is it necessary? Nope.

After nearly a week of home educating the timetable is the first thing I'm going to change. To complete all these lessons as I've timetabled here, takes pretty much the length of a school day. Which means fitting everything else we need or want to do during the day a bit of a challenge.

So one of the first and exciting things I have learnt is that though such a timetable is helpful at school it's not necessary at home. In a classroom environment where there may be different teachers coming in to teach lessons, or a larger number of students to teach, such a timetable with lessons focusing on particular learning areas and only a few learning outcomes can be helpful. In this way the teacher can check the whole class against only one, two or three learning outcomes. Checking a large class against many learning outcomes coming from a variety of learning areas in one lesson is pretty much impossible.

This isn't my situation anymore. I'm helping to educate one child. So, as he plays and works I am able to observe him working towards many learning outcomes in many learning areas at any given time or "lesson". For the learning area of English we could be learning about non-fiction texts say memoirs and biographies relating to a famous person in history. We would still include While Mr. r writes on the topic, I can check and assist his handwriting, sentence formation, use of graphemes and spellings, we can read together and discuss what we have learnt. We could do some research on the Internet about the person in history that we are learning about, go to museums and take photos using a digital camera. Mr. can learn how to download and write up a simple report, and so forth. In any given lesson on this one topic we are able to producing rich lessons that combine many different learning areas, strands and learning outcomes.

So, for now, I'm scrapping handwriting and guided reading and am talking to Mr. R about possible Geography and History topics we could learn about which I'll try be linking with the English ICT and Shastra (Religious Education) learning areas. Hopefully producing a learning environment that resembles real life, is interesting and fun.