Your custom academic schedule and free lesson plans
When enrolling your students, we ask you to provide us with at least some tentative dates for your academic school year, such as the start and end dates of your school year, as well as any vacations / days off such as your Christmas and Easter breaks. By providing this basic information, we can generate free, customized lesson plans for each of your students. (Show me a sample, customized lesson plans document. This links to a large pdf document which will either open in your browser or download, depending on your browser settings.)
But these customized lesson plans are not only papers you can print for use at home; they are also, in effect, a daily academic schedule, which we use to automatically help you stay informed as the school year progresses. More on this follows below.
First Step: Set up your family’s custom academic school year schedule
To set up your academic schedule and free lesson plans, simply create an account on our system. Once logged in, select the “Account” tab, then the “Applications” accordion menu choice, then click the “See/Edit My school year schedule” button. Once there, you can tell us the beginning and ending dates of your academic school year (usually, but not always, autumn of the current year, and May or June of the next ). You can also tell us as any vacations / holydays / holidays your will be taking off of schooling. It helps for us to know these so that, when calculating / generating your schedule, we not count on those days as available for schooling.
Second Step: Generate your free lesson plans!
Once your academic schedule is set up, and you have enrolled your student(s) in the courses you desire, you can easily generate lesson plans for each of your students. These lesson plans will be automatically emailed to you shortly after you generate them. Again: if you ever need to modify your student’s courses, or your family’s academic schedule, you can easily regenerate the lesson plans anytime. In fact, if you do not generate these plans at the time of enrollment, it is never too late – you can generate or regenerate them anytime:
Note: Our free, customized lesson plans are also a computer reminder system.
With your assistance, the student should follow the schedule on these lesson plans. But we wish to stress that our lesson plans are more than just a useful printed document for you and the student to reference. These lesson plans also “have teeth.” That is, the same software that created the plans also helps “enforce” the schedule. This is done by weekly academic progress reports we send during the school year to you (and the student, if you provide us an email address). These messages let you know whether the student is “on schedule”, falling behind, or, thanks be to God – ahead of schedule! We determine whether the student is on schedule by consulting which lessons have been submitted to us for grading, and cross-referencing that student’s academic schedule.
These reminders can be very useful for keeping the parent ‘in the loop” and keeping the student honest. No more asking, “Thomas, are you keeping up with your schoolwork?” You will always have a fairly good idea of how your students are doing both grade-wise and schedule-wise, because you get these weekly reports.
Please note that these reports are meant to help, not stress you or the student out. We completely understand that “life happens,” and students sometimes fall behind. That is the challenge of homeschooling. We will never pressure you or the student. Many parents find these messages helpful, but you can disable them anytime on the parent portal. Also, if the student, or your whole family is falling behind, you can easily move your family’s academic schedule ending date further out; then simply regenerate each student’s lesson plans.