Planning

It may not be a new school year, but it is a new year so I am using that to my advantage to do some planning and make some changes.  Last night I went through the kids work boxes and cleaned out all of the trash and organized their folders and notebooks.  It was fun to see how much we really have accomplished so far this year.  Some of our school goals for the new year are:

• Read more.  We have been really busy and I have missed our read alouds tremendously.
• Math facts.  The kids are great with these, but I want to make sure that practicing at their own level is part of our DAILY  routine during the week.
• More art. We all love this, but it can be a pain coming up with the supplies and dealing the mess. 
• Staying with the whole supplies and mess theme, more science projects.  We love science but it can be time consuming on my part and I often sometimes take short-cuts to make my life easier.
• Turn our library books in on time!  I have some hefty fines right now and we have to be better about this. 
• Get up on time!  Again this is hard because I hate, hate, hate, to wake a sleeping baby.  We need to be up at the same time everyday so this is a must!  Buster also needs an earlier bedtime, I can't say I am dreading this one.
• Work with the older girls on independence.  I need more time with the little ones and the older girls are perfectly capable of doing much more on their own at a reasonable pace.  We will work on this.

This at least provides us with a starting point.  I love fresh starts and I am actually really looking forward to Monday.