I recently received our maths books for next year. We use Horizons from Alpha Omega Publications, so each year level requires two workbooks. It’s a great ‘spiral’ curriculum that lays a fabulous foundation, especially in Base-10. We’re up to our fifth Horizons student and I am more than pleased with it, even though each of our children learn somewhat differently. I have found that Horizons provides me with a very solid plan to sequentially work through (and review) essential concepts, from which I can adapt my teaching according to each child’s needs. Anyway, enough about curricula.
What I really wanted to post about was how I try to develop systems that save me time during the year, most of which requires me to do the preparation prior to the commencement of our academic year. However…developing systems (even dumb details like I’m about to share now) often involves trial and error. Hopefully you can learn something here that helps you without having to mess up.
Horizons workbooks come bound like a paperback, but with perforated pages. I like to remove the pages and put them in each child’s maths file (4-ring binder). In order to do that, the perforated pages have to be punched. I’ve tried several methods:
- I tore the pages out and punched a stack of them when a child told me they’d run out of worksheets. Result: not a good idea. Things did not run smoothly. Certain children ‘forgot’ to mention they’d run out of worksheets, I’d forget they’d asked me the day before, or it was just plain inconvenient to do when I already had a really full day. (This was probably the catalyst for trying to get organised before the year began – which I am still working on).
- I pulled the pages out of an entire book and asked an older child to punch them for me. Result: whilst this seemed a simple enough task, the job wasn’t done to my satisfaction. I know I struggle with perfection at times, but pages punched on the wrong side (HOW did that happen????) and pages that had holes too close to the edge just didn’t cut it – and it was a whole book, possibly two (I’ve wiped as much from my memory as possible). I wonder when I am going to learn that kids just don’t see things quite the way adults do. (Maybe that’s why God has given us so many????)
- The next year, I got my husband to take the four workbooks into work. He works in a large inner-city office that has admin staff and a fabulous drill hole-punch. Because it had to be punched further in on the page than normal (due to the binding plus the perforation), I marked where I wanted the holes to go. Somehow the importance of drilling exactly where these holes were marked got lost in translation and were drilled too close to the edge. Result: This time FOUR workbooks worth of worksheets had lovely holes punched neatly into them right along the edge of the perforations. I had to re-punch the whole lot by hand underneath the drill-punch holes. Arghhh!
- Try again. This year (2010), I took the four workbooks into Office Works, marked with where I wanted the holes to be punched. I explained (personally, with demonstration) why they had to be punched there and nowhere else. Result: Fantastic! Job done. No hassles having to re-punch anything. I filed a term’s worth of work in each child’s file at the beginning of each term. The only downside was it cost me $16 (4 workbooks x 4 holes each @$1 per hole). I am a bit of a cheapskate.
- Try, try again. For 2011, I’m tearing out the pages from each workbook (which I would have to do anyway) and bull-dog clipping them together (as if they were bound). Then I’m going to mark the holes (as the past two years) and I’m sending them in for my dh’s lovely admin assistants to punch for me. Since they can now see where the edge of the pages actually are, this shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ll let you know how it goes…
