I’m sure that this actually has a different official name somewhere, but I call it course projections. This is one of those things that when people ask me how I plan our school year, they say “That is a really cool idea!” When I came up with it 12 years ago, I just thought everybody did it. So what are course projections? Course Projections is a table that I made that divides the 180 day school year into the 4 quarters (9 week grading period). I use it to keep up with where we are supposed to be in a textbook, regular book or study by a certain point in the school year.
It helps out tremendously during the year to have this chart to refer to. If you get sick, or you miss some time during school, you can see exactly where you need to be! I can know that on day 90, I need to be on Chapter 13 of a reading book for example. Or that on day 45, I should be on lesson 45 of math. It just gives me a reference point and it’s not meant to be a taskmaster. So how do you do it?
From “Girlfriend’s Guide 2 Homeschooling”
Down the left side, I list all of the textbooks or classes that each child is taking. Some textbooks are already laid out with 180 lessons, so those are easy! For those you would have Day 45=lesson 45, Day 90=lesson 90, Day 135=lesson 135 and Day 180=Lesson 180. Some other textbooks you have to do a little math and planning to figure out where you want to be by the target dates. For example, if you do Apologia, they have 16 modules (depending on which one you’re doing). You can cover 4 modules every 9 weeks, approximately.
Then during the school year, you can refer back to your Course Projections page to make sure you are where you wanted to be! It’s that easy!
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