How do you plan and prepare for your homeschooling week?

Homeschooling--to do it well--often requires an almost monumental amount of energy, enthusiasm, and creativity.  Sometimes this is easy, especially when you're just getting started and everything is new and exciting anyway. After a few weeks though, summoning all that enthusiasm may require a bit more conscious effort.  To that end, I try to take a little time every weekend to prepare myself for the coming week--both in things practical, such as the specific things I want to accomplish, as well as things more psychological.  I often need to read only a little bit of educationally motivating literature before I start feeling particularly pumped up for another week of homeschool!  :)

As a bit of a preview of what I hope to be posting about in the coming week, I'll tell you what our plans are this week:

• Read at least one chapter of The Secret Garden out loud to R each day
• Do a color mixing experiment using water and food colors
• Learn about seconds, minutes, and hours
• Begin teaching C the sounds of the alphabet
• Practice colors and shapes with C through coloring and drawing
• Encourage R to write something--anything--each day (this might take some really creative thinking...)
• Learn about pilgrims (we have a book from the library)
• Do a fall craft of some kind involving leaves
• Do math using the Easy Peasy first-grade outline (see resources tab above)
• Dance to the silly songs CD that we got from the library
• Do a gospel lesson from the nursery lesson book each morning during breakfast
• Have R read more of her Book of Mormon stories book

To be clear, this list is just me brainstorming about all the things we COULD do this week and a lot of things I HOPE we get to do this week.  It is NOT something I feel obligated to stick to.  Why?  Because what matters more to me than anything else is that R stay interested and excited about what we're doing.  Insofar as I can keep her engaged in these particular activities (many of which are on the list specifically because she has shown some degree of interest) I will stick to my plans.  Everything is fluid and flexible though, and I love it being that way.  My only real goal each day is to get a little bit of reading, writing, and math done regardless of the shape or form that comes in.

So that is my practical planning.  In terms of my psychological preparation, I'm reading one of Charlotte Mason's books.  A lot of what she says is a little outdated or hard to apply in modern life, but she definitely has a lot of great bits of wisdom here and there too.  I'll leave you with one of my most recent favorites:

"One of the secrets of the educator is to present nothing as stale knowledge, but to put himself in the position of the child, and wonder and admire with him."