A lot has been happening here at Maple Hill Academy. Of course, they were all unexpected, and included things such as sickness. Besides not having time to Blog (which I'm sure you all noticed) - it has put us behind our homeschool plan.
It would be easy to panic at this point - especially as I expect to be very busy around the end of June, meaning that further delay may stop us from completing the entire year.
So - what do you do when things don't go as planned?
As "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" would say "DON'T PANIC!"
Especially in Year 1, there are really only a few things that I feel need to be completed to keep us over-all on track. Those are the good old-fashioned 3R's.... Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. Is your student learning their math? Is he learning to read? Is he learning to write? Even if you don't finish the whole program, if those are well on track by the end of the year, you have succeeded. And the chances are, your student will have learned a LOT more then that. "Gaps" won't be a huge deal -- remember that even at public school, if a student is sick - he just misses anything learned that day. At least in subjects like math that are sequential, we can make sure our student doesn't miss some important concept!
Even in the later years, if you end up having to skip a reading book, or miss a chapter or two of the history book, I think your student will still be far ahead.
So, what is my revised plan? We will just keep working with the schedule - who cares that we are not on the week that I wanted to be? At the end of the year, I can see where we are at. For stuff like Math, I have the choice of starting Year 2 wherever we have stopped in Year 1 - or we could spend a little bit of summer time finishing it up. For other subjects, that are not so sequential, I can decide to either skip some items - or for some of the reading books we could always read them together during the summer. Again, our choice.
I think the main thing is not to panic - not to get frustrated - not to let the student know that he is behind - and not to throw out the program!