I am a planner and I like to get everything ready as early as possible so I can relax and know that I am ready for the school year. I also tend to print as much ahead of time as possible. It seems helpful to show a visual guide of all I do to get ready for the school year, so that is what I plan to do in this post. I do some things a little differently due to adapting things to N. and his difficulty with handwriting. I will mark those with an *.
World Geography: First I prepared the Expedition Journal and I went ahead and printed off from the Mapping the World With Art CD any pages/activities/games that were needed for the first 15 weeks. Some of these go on cardstock and some on calligraphy paper. It was pretty time consuming which is why I just did 15 weeks.
I then gathered almost all of the supplies that he will need for Mapping the World With Art. This list is in the front of that book. I still need a few colors of acrylic paints.
Next I prepared his Book of Centuries and printed out all the timeline figures.
For the Living Library he fills out a summary sheet after most of the readings. Typically those are copied.
* For him I made a word document on his laptop so he can just type in his summaries.
World Religions and Cultures: I prepared his notebook. *These pages have lots of graphic organizers of odd shapes so it isn't going to work for N. to just type and then cut it to size so I went through each page and made a blank template of sorts so that he can type and then cut it out. They aren't exactly the same shape but they should work. Below is an example of what I am talking about. There are also pages of questions for several of the books so I typed out the questions in Word and made it where it should fit in the notebook page.
They won't be on white paper. I found a good deal on ivory paper, so I bought that specifically for this notebook and any others we decide to use it for.
There are bookmarks in the back that need copied. *However for N. I scan
them into the computer and load them on his Ipad in an app called
PDFexpert so he can type on the bookmarks. This worked well last year.
For Bible I purchased a leather bound prayer journal. I also copied and laminated Preparing Your Heart for Prayer sheet * The adaptation for Bible is that for the scripture memorization he is supposed to use some techiniques where he does things like re-write the verse leaving off certain words or cut out phrases and put them back together etc. It is a lot of extra writing which just won't work so I used bible gateway to copy each verse 3-4 times on paper and then he can use white out to mark out words or he can cut it up or highlight in different colors etc.
Logic: I photocopied the tests from the Art of Argument Teachers guide.
Spanish: the only thing I did was download the audio files from the website and put them in a folder on his laptop desktop.
English: He uses one notebook divided into sections for dictation, grammar, writing and literature. He also files his bookmarks from the living library in here. He also has the same common place book from last year. I didn't buy the student book for the Essentials in Writing so I had to print that. * I photocopy the dictation passages and that way he marks them up if he misses them and just checks them off when he is done and I have a record of the ones he has done for the year.
Science: He has his lab clothes from this year. He doesn't need a science notebook since everything is done in the lab manual or the activity booklets. I made a list of what extra materials he will need each week and usually I just look at that the weekend before a lab and make sure he has what he needs. The one thing I do still need to get is graph paper.
I think that is about it. Hopefully this helps others as they get ready for the World Geography guide. I have to say the more time I spend reading the books and looking at the assignments the more excited I get for him to do this guide.
