So what’s up with the long hiatus from new posts? In short, Caregiving for elderly grandparents while maintaining even VERY part-time work from home and homeschooling is exhausting mentally, physically and emotionally. Leaving very little creative juice for creating amazing unit studies that challenge a now middle schooler and are worth posting about.
To take some of the load off we used online curriculum for the past two years – DiscoveryK12 (5th grade) and MobyMax.com (6th grade). Neither program was perfect but it didn’t require a lot of hand-on administration from me which made it ideal for our circumstances. Again, not much post worthy there. Academic progress was made, state requirements were fulfilled, and we made it through a couple of very hard years.
So here we are, entering 7th grade, mourning the loss of one grandparent while the other – who doesn’t require constant care – is still in need of daily assistance. We’re returning to more of a hands-on, offline schooling, primarily at my son’s request. More structured and with more textbook than our early grades but with more room for creativity and combining subjects into unit studies than online schooling allowed.
In some ways, the past couple years may have set us back a little academically. By third/fourth grade we were doing work that was in many ways beyond the “typical” grade level work. If we had continued on a more interest-led, deepening study of those subjects we might be even farther now than we are. But the past two and half years have given us so much more than book smarts. The opportunity for my son to really know his great-grandparents and have a close relationship with them is priceless. And the growth in the sense of personal responsibility and competency in so many real life situations is much more valuable. This perspective, as much as anything, keeping me from the endless “Am I doing enough?” questions that would make our homeschooling journey anything but stressless.
Going forward I hope to be able to blog about some interesting and share-worthy projects and lessons. We have some ambitious plans going forward and I’m exciting to be creating some resources for our own use that I think others may benefit from as well. My home school planner is already making my life easier. So stay tuned and if I disappear again for a while it’s probably just to deal with life as it comes.
I love the idea of planning everything out and being the most organized homeschool mom anyone has ever seen. In theory.
Real life… Not so much. We’re definitely more of a go-with-the-flow, have-a-goal-but-flexible-on-getting-there kind of family. While my now 12 year old thrives on structure, any deviation from “the plan” can result in an anxiety spiral. We’re working on it.
Meanwhile, what works fairly well for us is to have a general plan (cover x number of pages in x subject most weeks) and outline each week or two as we go. Since I couldn’t find a planning book or pages that fit our needs, I did what I usually do. I made my own.
These pages are extremely flexible. Some weeks I’ll want to plan lessons for specific days to fit a unit study or special activities. Those weeks I’ll use the sections to assign lessons for each day. Other weeks I don’t care if he works on one subject all day or in whatever order he chooses – as long as the week’s work gets done – so can list lessons by subject.
The checkmarks to the left of each lesson we use as “done” to quickly see the week’s progres. The right side checkmarks can be used to show which assignments I’ve checked over or to indicate that he needs help with an assignment.
The second page has plenty of room to list all the “extras” as they happen. Books read, videos watched, field trips, library visits, special projects, etc.
You can download these pages for free below – or – purchase on Amazon a 128 page softcover book that includes
yearly attendance calendar
2 year (July 2018 – June 2020) calendar pages with space to note important dates
12 year overview planning spaces for yearly overview planning
52 weeks of undated planning & record keeping pages
extra lined and dot grid pages for book lists, co-op schedules, unit study planning, notes, diagrams, or whatever you need
Free Planning Pages
Free weekly home school planning and record keeping pages
We used Disney’s Imagineering DVDs from our library to get ready for our trip. The 11-video series covers a ton of information in a fun, interactive way. It was funny listening to the kids as we went through the park, “Remember when Asa (the DVD host) did that?”
The series includes:
Energy
Fluids
Newton’s 3 Laws of Motion
Gravity
Friction
Magnetism
Electricity
Levers & Pulleys
Trajectory
Design & Models
Animal Adaptations: Communication
Each DVD includes instructions for a try-it-yourself, interactive activity to reinforce the science principles in the video!
I highly recommend incorporating this series into your pre-trip homeschooling! A science teacher has archived 5 of the videos on her YouTube channel (as of June 2026).
I found the entire series available at my local library. Some of the DVDs are also available on Amazon or Ebay.
Social Studies is one area where we tend to study what comes up instead of following a set curriculum. Today’s lesson on Lewis and Clark was one of those random lessons that turned out pretty well.
We started by watching a Netflix documentary (National Geographic: Lewis & Clark , Great Journey West), pausing to follow the expedition’s journey on our US map and discussing how this journey relates to what they already knew.
After watching the movie the kids created postcards (various templates available at Teachers Pay Teachers) as if they were on the expedition writing to someone back home.
The Wright Brothers by Andrew Santella
The Wright Brothers: Heroes of Flight by Carin T Ford (Famous Inventors series)
Stealing Air by Trent Reedy
You Wouldn’t Want to be on the First Flying Machine by Ian Graham
You Can Draw Planes
How Airplanes Work by Paul Ohmann
The Wright Brothers biographies were used for reading/comprehension of non-fiction text. Students were also asked to pick 5 events from the Wright Brothers lives and create a timeline from those events.
** Note – This post has been updated because so many of the original resources are no longer available.
We used Disney’s Imagineering DVDs from our library to get ready for our trip. The 11-video series covers a ton of information in a fun, interactive way. It was funny listening to the kids as we went through the park, “Remember when Asa (the DVD host) did that?”
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