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Mackfam
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 12:32pm | IP Logged
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Kristie 4 wrote:
| I love looking at Jen's plans: they are so clear and visually appealing. When I look at them I must admit that we would be hard pressed to be reading 14 pages in a book, reading in another book, and pulling off a written narration in 30 minutes. Are your times fairly accurate- I only ask because we are struggling with working for the whole day again and not really completing our work so I wonder if we are just lethargic!! Thanks so much! |
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You're definitely NOT lethargic!!!
:: Those 9th grade plans are written for a very proficient reader!
:: She enjoys doing her written narrations all at once, during a quiet time after lunch, or saving them to do at the end of her day. Either is fine with me.
:: Also, I don't always ask her to narrate everything on her plans, even though I have indicated narrations almost everywhere! She needs to be PREPARED to narrate everything though! The written narrations are non-negotiable. They must be on my desk at the end of the day.
:: She prefers (and I do too) to do her oral narrations during quieter parts of the day, so we save narrations for early afternoon when the littles are napping/quiet. She can summarize quite well at this point, and we have chosen to sometimes do summary narrations at the end of a unit or section, rather than after every reading.
:: The little :: O Narrate :: indicators are there for me mostly. I need the reminder to stay on track with narrations...so they're helpful for me.
:: Some of the books are easier to read than others, and some of them have light pages (not a lot of text per page), thus an assignment may look long, but it is really not much reading.
:: The times are fairly accurate otherwise. She stays on track during her day with these times, and it's not too unusual for her to be about 30 minutes ahead of schedule before lunch and choose to complete an after-lunch assignment at that time.
:: Generally, she is finished with her day by 3:00, which is 30 minutes beyond what her lesson plans indicate. This accounts for the extra time spent with narrations and the fact that she generally enjoys exploring rabbit trails from her reading on her own during the day.
Hope this helps!!! 
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Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19 , ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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Mackfam
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 1:40pm | IP Logged
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Kristie 4 wrote:
| I only ask because we are struggling with working for the whole day again and not really completing our work |
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I wanted to add one more thing in light of this thought you shared, Kristie. It makes a difference when viewing those plans.
We have an agreement that the first week of every term is a *week for consideration*, which means that she lets me know (by making notes directly on the lesson plans and through our end of the week meeting) if I've stacked too much reading in one block of learning. We adjust if necessary. I'm also open to respectful discussion about assignments - one of the reasons I so enjoy our weekly meetings.
At this point in the game, my 9th grader is almost entirely self-educated. I'm delighted to be reaping the benefit of the habits of >> I AM, I CAN, I OUGHT, I WILL << cultivated in her earlier years. I could not hope for this lesson plan to be accomplished, not one iota of it, if my daughter were not responsible for it herself.
I've been in the position of struggling to accomplish the day's work before in home education. We brainstorm our way through those times considering habit needs (theirs and mine), additional tools that may be of help for struggling learners, adjusting expectations, adjusting resources, making expectations clear and understandable, and communicating together regularly. It's never perfect. It's always workable!
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Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19, ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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Erin
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 3:20pm | IP Logged
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Angel wrote:
| Revisiting this old thread as "planning season" rolls around again and wondering if any of you made any changes to your lesson planning routines this year? Did you need to try anything new to cope with a new situation or did your usual hold up? |
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Angela
I'm happy to say that finally (only taken 13yrs of hsing) I am content with our approach. We are using the same method this year as last  Can't believe I didn't talk in this thread before as I am a total convert to Excel spreadsheets and giving my children a 'sheet'.(took dh ten years to convert me)
Streamlined enough now that I give each of my children a sheet at the beginning of term(even the 6yr old begs for one) I still use my learning blog to 'think' and plan, and then can easily translate plans into the spreadsheet. Oh and I email my older children their own planning posts so they know what books to use etc. I was very impressed with my 11yr old this term, he thought to copy and paste his booklist into Word and print out! So I'll do that next term for all of them as well, printing onto the back of the term sheet. Only one paper to keep track of.
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Erin
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Angel
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 5:24pm | IP Logged
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Jen, I wanted to ask -- I know that at one point your dd was responsible for doing a lot of the planning herself. (I believe we talked about it on a thread here... somewhere...  ) Is she still doing that or is it more you/less her now?
Erin, I am always impressed with your spreadsheets .
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Angela
Mom to 9, 7 boys and 2 girls
Three Plus Two
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Mackfam
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 5:37pm | IP Logged
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Angel wrote:
| Jen, I wanted to ask -- I know that at one point your dd was responsible for doing a lot of the planning herself. (I believe we talked about it on a thread here... somewhere... ) Is she still doing that or is it more you/less her now? |
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She has done some plugging in of books into plan frameworks, and at one time, was given much more liberty in terms of managing her time each day, but she asked if I would provide her with the lesson plan already formatted with times to better facilitate a smooth, efficient day (this is a reflection of specific family needs this year). She still enjoys offering input, and does so at every level of this, from the idea stage, to building, adapting/changing, and living. It has worked out well for us, and fits with our family philosophy.
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Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19, ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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kristacecilia
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 7:10pm | IP Logged
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Mackfam wrote:
| At this point in the game, my 9th grader is almost entirely self-educated. I'm delighted to be reaping the benefit of the habits of >> I AM, I CAN, I OUGHT, I WILL << cultivated in her earlier years. I could not hope for this lesson plan to be accomplished, not one iota of it, if my daughter were not responsible for it herself. |
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How, exactly, did you accomplish this in her early years, Jen?! I am dying to know! Can we start another thread on this?
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God bless,
Krista
Wife to a great guy, mom to two boys ('04, '06) and three girls ('08, '10, '12!)
I blog at http://kristacecilia.wordpress.com/
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Mackfam
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 8:25pm | IP Logged
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kristacecilia wrote:
Mackfam wrote:
| At this point in the game, my 9th grader is almost entirely self-educated. I'm delighted to be reaping the benefit of the habits of >> I AM, I CAN, I OUGHT, I WILL << cultivated in her earlier years. I could not hope for this lesson plan to be accomplished, not one iota of it, if my daughter were not responsible for it herself. |
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How, exactly, did you accomplish this in her early years, Jen?! |
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One habit at a time.
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Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19, ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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Angel
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| Posted: March 23 2011 at 9:24pm | IP Logged
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So I'm sitting here with a piece of paper and a pen, trying out formats to get my little boys to the middle of May when we're going to take our longish break. I'm wondering how you all handle family work on a set of plans. My little boys combine for lots of subjects, but not all. I also need to know what to do for our family faith time.
Do you have a separate plan for family work?
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Angela
Mom to 9, 7 boys and 2 girls
Three Plus Two
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Erin
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| Posted: March 24 2011 at 4:32am | IP Logged
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Angela
What do you mean by family work? Are you talking chores, combined subject or something else?
For family faith time are you meaning all your children together? Or just your three/four little boys?
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Erin
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Becky Parker
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Hi Angela,
Here is a link to a very detailed lesson plan that I had created and used for some time. It reflects the flow of our day which includes family time and independent work time. I used it for a while, but then the actual planning became too cumbersome so now I'm back to a more simple plan. Using this detailed plan sort of helped me to see clearly the flow of our day and now, when I make my more general plans, it's just habit.
Obviously a detailed plan like this is going to reflect your natural routine so I hesitated to post it, but maybe it will give you an idea. There are 3 pages to it. The first is a plan of subjects we do together each morning. Then there is a page that is a plan for the kids individual work, and finally a page for the plan of our afternoon together time. It's very detailed! I needed that for a while, so it served it's purpose.
Regarding Family Faith Time, we try to do this as one of our first things. A chart on the first page of my planner is in the link above. I try to cover three areas with each child - Catechism, Bible, and Saints.
We've done this various ways in various combinations of kids. I find it is easy to study the saints with the kids all together. We accomplish this by reading a combination of picture books and chapter book read alouds. My kids really enjoy learning about the saints. When they get into 5th grade and beyond, they also work on some individual saint studies, writing a short report or giving an oral report. I usually have them do about 1 of these per quarter.
Catechism is a one on one thing with me so I cycle through the kids while the others work mostly independently. I say mostly because we do Catechism memory and I have the kids within hearing distance of one another for this. Hearing my dd answer her questions for 6th grade will someday help my 1st grader to remember them ... I hope.
For Bible I've done various things but right now that is one on one time with me too. I don't know if it has to be that way though. My 1st grader is often making comments when I do the Bible History readings with my 5th grader.
There you go - probably more information than you wanted!
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Becky
Wife to Wes, Mom to 6 wonderful kids on Earth and 4 in Heaven!
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Angel
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| Posted: March 24 2011 at 7:54am | IP Logged
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Erin wrote:
What do you mean by family work? Are you talking chores, combined subject or something else?
For family faith time are you meaning all your children together? Or just your three/four little boys? |
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Sorry, Erin, that I wasn't clearer. By "family work" I mean what we do either all together (like our faith time, which is very similar to Becky's) or what the little boys do together (basically everything but phonics, copywork, and math). I really love the simplicity of Jen's charts because visually they're very easy to see at a glance what needs to be done, but my little boys combine for so many things, I'm not sure how to do that in chart format. It would seem redundant to break them out as separate plans. Really right now I'm just trying to rescue our year. And working on it.
Becky, your planner pages are so well done. I don't think you should have hesitated to post them, even though you are not using them at this time. (I saw Melanie's post on her file crate when she first posted it and thought it looked very interesting!) I like to look at LOTS of different kinds of examples in order to combine and figure out what works best for US, and I'm sure that others do the same.
That's why this thread is so helpful and why I wanted to update it!
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Angela
Mom to 9, 7 boys and 2 girls
Three Plus Two
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Mackfam
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| Posted: March 24 2011 at 8:15am | IP Logged
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I don't have our *family/together* things broken out into chart-like plans. I mostly keep those books and things we're doing together in one basket and just pull from it during the day.
There are three times a day I tend to pull from the basket:
:: Breakfast - (while they're eating) I usually start the day with a read aloud on faith, virtues, the saints, or something liturgical.
:: Lunch - (after eating and while they clean up) This varies - sometimes it's about a composer, an artist, a little Shakespeare, a seasonal poem, an article in a Nature magazine.
:: Evening - (after family prayers) Usually the family read aloud.
Our family basket is really what our Morning Basket has evolved into here. Same basic content and idea - just spread out throughout the day.
I've always liked the way some of Suzanne's plans are laid out (she links them somewhere on this thread) in a weekly format way and thought of something simple like that for our Morning/Family Basket of work and reading.
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Jen Mackintosh
Wife to Rob, mom to dd 19, ds 16, ds 11, dd 8, and dd 3
Wildflowers and Marbles
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Maryan
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| Posted: March 24 2011 at 9:34am | IP Logged
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Angela, I've been madly starting to plan for next year! Bumping this up and bouncing around ideas really help me think! I was pretty down about our progress in January, but I think I need to be realistic and not idealistic and acknowlege that our plans worked really well this year considering the year we had! We're behind in some subjects (due to my high risk pregnancy and having a baby), but I'm impressed that we're even in the game and I know that's due to all the plans I made this summer. Lots of extra subjects got scratched but I "plan" for that to happen.
My lesson plans this year:
- This year's plans were different than last years -- on one side I made my plans and on the other I used Winterpromise's lesson plan sheet example here on page 3.
- So I made my plans look like theirs in Word Perfect using tables and inserting pictures again: Here's a quick blog post that I wrote today just to record what I did for my future reference! I photocopied my plans to the other side of theirs and put them in a notebook.
- Currently, I'm liking these Mead notebooks because it still has the three ring part but the binder can fold back on itself, so it's not so huge if I just want to look at one side. Some even let you insert your own cover picture. (Books that are too big to handle are a big issue for me... weird, I know).
But my problem with my plans for next year:
- Since now we know that anytime we are pregnant, it will be Mom-gone-at-many-appointments-an-hour-away-at-least-once-a-w eek, I've decided that I need to plan for that inevitability rather than plan for not being pregnant and then under the duress of appointments switch our plans??
- This fall, I was gone a lot and had to rely on babysitters to help to school work. Only two of my sitters could do all our plans and that's because one was a mom of seven (expecting eight) and she *is* superwoman and the other was an almost empty nester who was an army wife who homeschooled seven kids!!
- Anyway, I'm rethinking the whole wheel for us. Unfortunately, I think it means dropping Right Start (which I love!) and a few other programs that require a lot of mom-led lessons. I'm also trying to figure out if I need to make more independent plans for my older kids -- maybe separate plans like Jen? (Love them Jen!!) Not sure. Will I be able to keep track of them?
- I used the file folder system again this year... which is great; however, this year we are HORRIBLE at getting our narrations and copywork in our binders and there is paper EVERYWHERE!.
 I think I need to actually make spiral bound books for each kid with all poems, writing assignments, copywork, narration pages this summer, so we are completely portable and most paper has a home alreadySo if I put it all in a spiral or maybe a flexible binder, we could just grab a few books and go?? That's my theory right now. Would my lesson plans be in their little books? Not sure. - In history next year, we're doing Pentecost through the Reformation. I know the boys will LOVE this time period, so I'm trying to figure out how to do fun things and read great books... simply.
But since this post is already a book,  and since I think my stream of consciousness has brought me to questions that I need to ask you lovely ladies in its own post when I get a chance, AND since from the looks of things, my kids are thniking that snack time is going to last all day, I'll stop now.
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Maryan
Mom to 6 boys & 1 girl: JP('01), B ('03), M('05), L('06), Ph ('08), M ('10), James born 5/1/12
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Erin
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| Posted: March 24 2011 at 4:03pm | IP Logged
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Angel wrote:
I'm wondering how you all handle family work on a set of plans. My little boys combine for lots of subjects, but not all. I also need to know what to do for our family faith time.
Do you have a separate plan for family work? |
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Angel wrote:
| By "family work" I mean what we do either all together (like our faith time, which is very similar to Becky's) or what the little boys do together (basically everything but phonics, copywork, and math). I really love the simplicity of Jen's charts because visually they're very easy to see at a glance what needs to be done, but my little boys combine for so many things, I'm not sure how to do that in chart format. It would seem redundant to break them out as separate plans. Really right now I'm just trying to rescue our year. And working on it. |
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If you were writing the plans out to give to the boys to tick/colour I wouldn't see it as redundant. (I'm thinking more your 7yr old, assuming the 5yr olds aren't interested) Anyway if you are working in Excel or even word, it would only be a matter of copying and pasting.
Even if the chart format is for yourself, but you have columns for each child, just copy out the same info into each column.
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Erin
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mamacitapita
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| Posted: April 06 2011 at 9:46pm | IP Logged
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I can't get the link to Maria Rioux's plans to work. Can anyone help me out?
Blessings,
Becky
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cathhomeschool
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| Posted: April 06 2011 at 10:23pm | IP Logged
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Maria mentioned that she's working on updates on this thread. That thread contains good links to cached versions of her plans.
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Janette (4 boys - 22, 21, 15, 14)
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mamacitapita
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Thanks, Janette.
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LMBMommyof4
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| Posted: April 08 2011 at 10:59am | IP Logged
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Wow, I am really enjoying reading the responses! You ladies are an inspiration!
I really want to get away from the "here is a book, work on it" approach. It is difficult with 4 children in 4 different grades.
I am hoping to come up with some new and different hands-on type of activities for next school year.
We are currently fully enrolled with Seton. I think for next year I may just enroll for Math and Religion and try doing my own thing for the other subjects.
God bless,
Lisa
Mom to Michael (almost 13), Jonathan (11), Matthew (9) and Katharine (7)
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AmandaV
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Bumped to update - though not updated, the links to Maria's syllabi are working again. I know she has made some changes though that she will incorporate when re-introduced.
http://www.shirreware.com/StThomasSite/Site/Welcome!.html
And I will be re-reading this thread ... So much wisdom!
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Amanda
wife since 6/03, Mom to son 7/04, daughter 2/06, twin sons 6/08 and son 7/11, son 1/2014
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CrunchyMom
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I was just popping in since this thread was bumped to say I've been working on pretty plans, and I made a pretty template in Word using a table to keep everything lined up And formatted regardless of what I insert. Then I have the separate categories organized in excell so I can easily copy and paste each week into my pretty template.
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Lindsay
Five Boys(6/04) (6/06) (9/08)(3/11),(7/13), and 1 girl (5/16)
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[URL=http://mysymphonygarden.blogspot.com/]Lost in the Cosmos[/UR
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4Real Forums : Planning and Ordering our Days
Topic: creating assignments/lesson plans
