I have posted a few updates on Facebook at The Parenting Passageway page and on Instagram @theparentingpassageway, but here is an official updated planning post for fourth grade and where I am now…

• I have laid out our school year and matched each week of our school year to a main lesson block topic
• I looked at our “big picture rhythm” and thought ahead about festivals and birthdays
• I have laid out a general rhythm for the school week – Mondays are journal writing and movement (and on selected Mondays, writing a rough draft of a letter in place of a journal entry); Tuesdays are yoga and journal writing; Wednesdays are  movement and the day for our fourth grader to cook dinner; Thursdays are mindfulness games, cleaning day, painting day, and instead of main lesson we will have nature studies or STEM kinds of activities or both.  Fridays we take off.
• I made a quick list of each block by week on a legal pad and jotted down some brainstorming notes for practice ideas and projects.
• This week I gathered many of my resources and grouped them into piles  by block or topic.

In my last post here, I detailed the order of my blocks.  So I started here:

• August-  Man and Animal 1 which will flow into….
• September/October – Local Geography and Man and Animal 2 – we will be looking at the regions of our state through habitats and our local animals/camping
• November – Math/Introduce fractions
• December- Geometry/ Form Drawing – most likely will draw from Viking Hero Tales by Isabel Wyatt
• January – Norse Mythology
• February – Birds of Prey (special interest of my student)- each morning I am going to try to work in fraction problems related to birds!  That should be interesting!
• March – Weland the Smith – rather dark tale, but I think our son will love it.
• April – African Tales/African Hero Tales/camping trips
• May – Math in the Garden (leading into Botany for Fifth Grade)/ camping trips

And this is where I currently am from that:

• August – Math Review of Measurement/Fractions (will introduce fractions over the summer) – I think with birds
• September – Cherokee and African-American tales leading into local geography
• September – Man and Animal 1 (2 weeks)
• October – Man and Animal 2  (tied into animals of our state, keystone species of our state, review of geography)
• November – Math – Geometry, review of fraction skills – adding and subtracting fractions (soul food American folk tales)
• December – Thorkill of Iceland or Viking Tales, undecided, knots and forms
• January – Math, Fractions – Norse Myths as “soul food” and we may draw or paint off of those
• February –  Birds of Prey, report writing
• March – Dream of King Alfdan or Weland the Smith (undecided and at the moment I can’t seem to locate either book in my house since I am in the midst of cleaning out our school room.  End of year woes).
• April – Earth, Air, Wind, and Fire (soul food tales from The Golden Stag by I. Wyatt); Camping
• May – African Tales

Right now I am essentially grouping books and resources into piles by block, and throwing possible read-alouds near there.  As I put blocks together more fully, I will post pics on IG/Facebook and update here.

Many blessings,

Carrie