We’ve been trying a thing around here, or at least I’ve been trying a thing, to better organize our time. Because I’m not a homeschooler. But…I work. I work at home, I have a child in half day preschool (probably next year as well), I have a child getting 4 sessions of private speech and OT each week, I do not have childcare, I do not want to just park my 5-year-old in front of the TV all day.

So, I needed a game plan to get organized enough to get my work done, get to the gym, keep the house running, get her to her therapies, and still find time to hang out with her and do fun and engaging and creative activities. And occasionally park her in front of the TV, because deadlines and meetings don’t always fit my magic schedule. It mostly works, but the gym still does not happen as much as I’d like.

I have this lengthy Trello board with my master plan. This is just a screen shot of some of it. There is much scrolling, in every direction, but I have this map of our days to work from.

Trying to have art projects and science projects at the ready ahead of time is a challenge on my best day, and I’m pretty crafty and organized when it comes to such things. So, we’re trying themed weeks. I pick a theme for the week, and our library books, art project, science, and Friday Field Trip all sort of loosely tie into that theme. Some weeks will be easier than others. This was an easy week. Dinosaur week, which we did at the beginning of the month.

That stack of books above was our library haul on Monday that week. For our art project, we made dinosaur fossils. I used this salt dough recipe and fossil tutorial from Learning 4 Kids.

Then we brushed the dino shapes with brown water (food coloring + water) and baked them until they dried out.

For our science project that week, I hid the fossils around our yard so we could go on a dinosaur hunt and dig them up. And read some library books about how fossils are found, and what they are. But the weather turned bad, so it was a few days before we got out to find them. And, I couldn’t remember where I hid them all, so we have thus far found 6 of the 8 fossils I put out there. I’ll count that as success!

Then on Friday, when we do our afternoon field trips, we went to the NJ State Museum. Which she loves, and we had a great time.

So, the first week of this new plan went pretty well. Now we’ve had a lot going on since then, so we’ll probably start our new theme on Monday. I’ll fine tune this schedule and see if we can keep up with it. She dug (see what I did there?) having everything tie together for the week, and she was much more invested in some of these activities than she often is. So, we’ll keep going and see how we do.