New Year New Planner

 

Each year, I try to get a planner or planner system that will fit my goals and needs for the upcoming year.  In complete honesty 2020's planner was a hodgepodge of bullet journal, big planner, notes, and mess so fitting for the year.  This year with a little more clarity on where I want to focus and what my goals are I chose a traveler's notebook.  While, I have used this system in the past and even created my own (link to how to create), this is my first time with so many individual journals. 

This notebook contains a pouch for my pens, envelope for my notes or receipts, folder pockets, and slots for business cards. The best part is I am able to place 6 journals within this one notebook.  Narrowing my plans and notes down to 6 areas of my life was difficult being a multipotentialite.  (A multipotentialite is a person who has many different interests and creative pursuits in life. Multipotentialites have no “one true calling” the way specialists do.)   Somehow, I managed to do this.  The 6 journals include a calendar, notes on our homeschool/unschool, family resources, and then one for my son, my daughter, and myself.

I plan to use this accordingly.  A calendar is obviously for appointments, deadlines, activities, meeting, and all things scheduled. The journal on our homeschool/unschool is a landing place for ideas, games, books, interests, and activities we are or might enjoy together.  This also gives me space to record learning that is happening through notes, lists, or mind maps.  The family resource journal is a spot for sizes, needs, desires, favorites, subscriptions, goals, and doctor visit schedule (you know the dentist sneaks up on me every-time or I can't remember the date of the last yearly physical which can't be done twice in one year or insurance refuses to pay),  Then individual notebooks for each of my kids.  This, hopefully, will allow me a space to record classes, activities, involvement, business plans and ventures, contacts, individual mind maps, goals, and ideas. I find that our relaxed, unschool-y approach to high school will rely heavily on the notes I take on their individual and group learning.  I usually move this information to a spreadsheet for the transcript but until then I need the notes so I can capsulate all the learning that happens everyday for each teen.  Finally, the journal for myself holds goals, projects, homeschool support group leader notes, books read, tracking for personal goals, yoga schedule ideas, and work information for the part-time teaching I do to help homeschool families.  

I am very excited to begin this planner system and pray it host a organized, productive year after a year of slow time, mismatched activities, uncertainty, and perspective shifts.  

Perspective in Learning

 

Last week, I wrote about perspectives and how it makes a difference in the way you see things.  Homeschooling, learning, education also have an element of perspective.  

When I have my "school" glasses on, I see learning differently.  With "school" glasses, I mean visualizing the learning through subjects, memorization, and isolated understanding.  The perspective I have is one of lacking.  I see what my kids don't know, haven't learned, can't understand.  Yet when I remove the glasses, thus shifting my perspective, I move to abundance, seeing more knowing, learning, understanding.  Sitting with each of them,  I observe all they are truly accomplishing interconnected in everyday living.  This is true learning as they synthesize and grow, instead of performing rote tasks for some outside influence.  

What perspective do you have on learning today? 

Perspective Makes a Difference

Your perspective is the way you see something.  Perspective has a Latin root meaning "look through" or "perceive."

My son and husband enjoy duck hunting.  This past weekend they spent the entire day hunting in a near by river.  Apparently, my son took the boat down the river to look for birds.  He must have gone further than my husband thought he planned to go.  So my husband called him to return which took a while.  Once he return, my husband was disappointed as he felt my son had used too much gas as the boat was "almost empty" with 2 gallons of gas left.  My son told me the same story, but with the comment, "I don't know why dad was mad.  There was still 2 gallons of gas left."  Same story, same amount of gas, but different perspectives.

Perspective changes the scene you experience.  Whether it is your visual perspective, your experience perspective, or even cultural perspective.