Scheduling 101

One of the questions that new homeschoolers often ask, is "How do you schedule everything?" There are many approaches to making a schedule. Some homeschooling families find that having a very regimented schedule keeps them on track, with each subject being taught at a certain time. Others feel stifled by such structure and find a more free-flowing day a better fit for their family. I have tried both in the past and found that we did best somewhere in between: a daily schedule of events with lots of flexibility built in. But that was with just one school-aged child. What challenges would two bring?


In my homeschool notebook, on the back of the last page of the Five in a Row section is a page where I scribbled down my notes for our term 1 schedule last fall. It was my first year of doing a full routine of lessons with two children, Junebug (5th Grade) and Legoboy (1st Grade), while still meeting the needs of Lovey, age two.  It looks something like this:

 

(I know, the picture doesn't give you much information. Let me give you the guided tour.)

The left hand column are Legoboy's lessons from Year 1 - Ambleside Online. They included daily penmanship, phonics, math, poetry, Spanish and Bible. Throughout the week we also were to read from 9-10 other books that included literature, history and science. Charlotte Mason advocated doing "short lessons" with her pupils. These short lessons lasted between 5 to 15 minutes for her younger students.  In my experience, and hers, this is really about as long as you can expect a young child to pay careful attention. In the left margin I have calculated that it would take about 1 hour to do his daily lessons and then another hour (or so) to do the extra lessons. Ideally, these lessons were to be completed in the morning, freeing up our afternoons to do "extra" things, such as nature study and handicrafts.

The middle column are Junebug's lessons from Year 5 - Ambleside Online. In addition to the daily lessons of Year 1 (excluding phonics), Latin and musical instrument practice were added. She also had 8 additional subjects to be done throughout the week. I made note of how many times each week she would have to do each subject. Since she is older, each lesson could be expected to take 20-30 minutes to complete.  Again, these were to be her morning lessons.

The right hand column is a list of the "extra" weekly lessons that they were both expected to do: art, map/timeline, handicrafts, music appreciation/composer study, nature study, art appreciation/artist study. In addition, Junebug would have Grammar, Plutarch, Piano Lessons and Shakespeare. These activities would ideally be done in the afternoon.

Confused yet? I certainly was. Having two children to schedule really gave me trouble. The bottom of the page in my notebook is my attempt to organize all of this into a cohesive and simple format Monday - Friday. In the previous years, with only one set of lessons to deal with, I was able to organize the lessons into a nice schedule that became the rhythm for the day. Now, with two, I was at a loss on how to get it all fit in without running myself ragged. Could I possibly homeschool two children with no schedule, but rather just a list of daily and weekly subjects? Would it be too chaotic? Would we fall behind?  Being flexible and finding what works best for you are two of the joys (and challenges) of homeschooling. With a headache building and no better alternative in sight, I decided to try something different.

To save myself from reinventing the wheel, I found a pdf file on the AO-Member-Schedules Yahoo Group for Year 1 that had a check list of each week's lessons already formatted. I only had a few substitutions to make, so I decided to use it for Legoboy's lessons. And you know what? It worked out very well. When we had the time to do the lessons, I looked at the week's list, pulled out the books we needed/wanted to work on and checked them off when complete. Some days we did them in the morning, some days in the afternoon in the car while Junebug went to music co-op class, or at the kitchen table while Lovey was napping.

Junebug was mostly independent with her lessons. I created a file of all her lessons for the term, printed it out and let her work on things as she wanted. I made sure to set aside an hour or so each day to help her with math or Plutarch or Shakespeare. She took several breaks throughout the day to play with Legoboy or help with housework and finished by 3:00pm each afternoon. I missed spending time with her, but it really taught her to schedule her own time and find her own rhythm to the day. By the end of the last term she had gotten a bit behind, but was determined to finish up "on time". On her own, without any prompting from me, she made her own list of what she needed to complete by the end of the week and she did it! I was very proud.

Note: We finished our school "year" last week and  are currently on break from lessons. We will be starting Year 2 and Year 6 in just a couple of weeks. With only some slight tweaking, I am going to use the same system for scheduling this year, too.  No more complicated charts for me!