Homeschool Planning

This is our second year homeschooling without CC. 

This is the first year I am making my own plans without reference to our old CC guides. 

It's a lot of work to make my own plans. 

It was much easier to get a guide from CC and just do whatever we needed to do to follow that.  

Even as a diligent Challenge director and homeschool parent, I always felt off balance and back on my heels, because I was discovering what someone else had planned for me and my students.

This is obviously because my guides had been written by someone else and as often as I read them carefully, I was always discovering/ accommodating myself to someone else's plan. 

Now, even though it is harder to make my own plans, there are already huge advantages occurring to me. 

First of all, I am going to be moving forward into a homeschool year knowing exactly what I am doing, why, and how, because I am planning everything myself. 

Now, I know my plan "like the back of my hand" and I am entering the year with peace and confidence that I didn't experience when I was getting my plans premade.

Second, we are still doing a rigorous amount of work, but the amount of work never ventures into the absurd or inhumane amounts like it sometimes did in CC.  The solution for many CC families was to "scale" and do less than what was assigned. 

I can scale as I plan, so my plans will be challenging and rigorous, but never impossible. 

By leaving CC and abandoning their guides, I certainly gave up the convenience of having someone else make my plans. 

But in so many ways, planning is proving a blessing, because I am taking ownership of my homeschool like never before.