I am always refining the best way to help Christopher take more responsibility for his lessons and for us to keep tabs on our progress. We did the calendar method but it had designated lessons for days of the week and life always throws things off so it wasn’t so easy to move things around as we adjusted. We’re trying this instead, a checklist by week. We figured out what he needed to get done and instead of putting it for certain days he simply checks it off as he tackles the work.

I still have designated days (M – art, T – new spelling words, W – music, Th – literature/co-op, F – history, S – science.) BUT if Christopher wants to do one of those things on another day he does and then I also cover them on our specific day. So he’s just getting enrichment work if he wants it another day, like yesterday he asked to do some history work but we’ll all read our chapter together today.

I also explained that if he wants my help with things (like math) then he’ll need to ask for help in the morning when I have lesson time. I pointed out some obvious things like he’ll need to ask me for his new spelling words BEFORE his spelling test and that if he saves all of his work for Friday it’s going to be a very long day.

So far this is working really, really well. He knocked out most of his lessons by Wednesday! (If that consistently happens we may need to see if we’re not giving him enough lessons. 🙂 ) And instead of just putting a check mark I left space for him to write in which lesson he did – Saxon 54 # 115, piano lesson on this page, SOTW chapter 4, etc. We keep this in the front of his binder and we’ll keep them as a very rough summary of what we’ve learned! (I’m working on a more lengthy explanation by month we can store for portfolios that covers titles read, subjects covered, etc.) And I laid it out so it’s six weeks per page, very compact. When we know we’ll be on breaks (like the holidays or vacation) then instead of listing the dates for one week I list them for two weeks and he can get the work done anytime in that larger window of time. Did that make sense? So the weeks of Christmas & New Years he’ll have two weeks to cover one week’s worth of lessons.

For Christopher this seems to be a good motivator and simple way to help him take more responsibility for when he does lessons, managing his time, etc.