Doing the Apologia elementary series daily & preparing for the next week.

 We are using the Apology journal notebooks with our Botany study. I love having these so I do not have to spend time printing or finding notebook pages.

   Originally I was going to follow the schedule in the notebook but I found when only doing the lessons two days a week there was a lot of reading to do in two days. So we now do short lessons usually focusing one one topic a day. This makes for nice short lessons as Charlotte Mason would recommend but we are still covering all the material just in 5 days verses two.This is working very well for us.

   This is how I prepare for the next lesson. First, I look at the schedule and circle the first notebooking page and last notebooking page for the week. Then I write down the pages I will be tearing out of my notebook. Yes, I tear them out to organize my self. My kids have ruined and lost notebooks so when they are done they go in my completed draw for my portfolio samples.This way I will have their samples of completed work. They are good at returning their journal to their workbox when they are done but they have also misplaced or left them outside :/

After I tear the pages we are doing for the week I trim off the messy ends.

   I glued a folder in the back of the kids journals where I place the pages we will be doing for the week. This is a good way for me to choose what pages we will be doing and helping me navigate what we will cover during the week. From there we just read through the book and work daily on our notebooks until they are all completed.
     They recommend reading through the lesson one week then doing the notebooks and projects the next week. For my family I like to work through it using the Charlotte Mason approach. Short lessons then narrating in written form in our notebooking journal daily. We also answer the questions only a few questions at a time covering the material we read about. We do this before we narrate that helps them get ideas what to write about.  We then finish the lesson after covering all the notebooking pages with review journal pages like the crossword puzzles etc. and activities at the end of the lesson following the weekly schedule.

 I wanted to mention in each lesson there is a page that you glue colorful mini-books etc. in the notebooking journal pages. They are found in the back of the book and the lesson they coordinate with is listed on the bottom of the page. When I am preparing for the week if there is a page with a mini-book I make and prepare the page before placing it in the back of the folder for the coming weeks work.

I just wanted to share what is working for me that is a little different than the recommended whey of following the schedule and working through the notebook. I love doing Science daily instead of the recommened twice a week and this system makes it easy for me to prepare for the next weeks lesson.