Planning, Scheduling, and Curriculum Choices (oh, my!)

Encouraging more reading. When I want my children to read particular books, I set those books out where they have easy access to them. I’ve found that although it may make for a messier house, if books are not left out, it’s quite possible that they won’t read them. (Out of sight, out of mind.) Same goes for science experiments or any other enrichment activity.

Using our planner pages. In the past, I have not written what we plan to do in my planner. I have written what we actually did in my planner. For those who use one of our checklist-style planners, here are three different examples of what that might look like:

You can use the small boxes to check off as you complete tasks, you can use them to tally times for your records, or you can write in the individual lessons. So, our planning pages ended up being our recording pages.

Long-term scheduling of math/phonics. The only planner pages I use for long-term planning are our six-week and twelve-week subject planners. I use these to get an estimate of where we should be in our math and phonics books by the end of each six-week period. It just helps me with pacing and scheduling breaks into our school year and helps me know how many field trips and rabbit trails we can go down. The following is an example of how I plan long-term, but I don’t actually type it up. I use a pencil and scribble my own made-up abbreviations in the boxes.

For an editable Excel version of this planner (where you can input the starting date and other info), click here.

Using spiral notebooks to plan. This year, instead of using our planner to write our plans, I’m using spiral notebooks to log in each daily task checklist for each of my children. (See this post for more details.) It seems like a lot of work, but it takes less than 10 minutes per day for me to do this for two of my children, and it has been much better than having a daily generic laminated checklist. I have taught our oldest (in middle school) how to do this himself. So what about all the planners? Well… I’m using our Reading Plan Only version (see the next point) as a reference along with our Cycle 1 At-a-Glance Pages. I’m pacing our school year with our six-week and twelve-week subject pages, and that’s about it.

An aside:  Oh, how I love having a middle school student! He’s currently learning skills in planning and autonomy, and I’m learning to let go. It’s a wonderful thing to see him maturing (not to mention, the wonderful discussions we’re having!). Even though I miss the early years, this is precious!

Our Reading Plan. At the bottom of our planner pages is our actual “plan.” Again, this is more of a guideline. We don’t do it all. It is my reference for what I’d like to get done over the course of the year. I plan out 24 weeks of reading and activities for our family. We usually complete those 24 weeks over our 36-week school year.

If you’re asking, “How on earth can you possibly do all of that?!?” …before I publish my plans, I actually time myself reading out loud, etc. to ensure it isn’t excessive.

• The Mystery of History lessons usually take less than 10 minutes to read.
• The A Child’s Geography lesson and God’s Design for Life lessons usually take less than 10 minutes to read.
• We usually read our read-aloud before bedtime. Sometimes we read for extended periods over the weekend. I have the boys read some of the picture books and readers out loud to me in the afternoons.
• Song School Latin takes about 10 minutes for us (we focus primarily on DVDs and flashcards).
• Notebooking (handwriting/copywork practice) usually takes less than 15 minutes, and our family mainly just uses Script-n-Scribe.
• Blob mapping and/or tracing takes less than 5 minutes.
• Math drills are incorporated into our Saxon and ABeka lessons, so this is just part of math.
• Our Mother Tongue is an “outloud” lesson I will complete with Levi. It takes 10-15 minutes.
• The Other Activity section is just a way to review memory work. We won’t be too worried about completing these, as we usually practice our memory work by singing the memory work songs and creating visuals like our Timeline Thumbnails or Comic Illustration Pages.
• Subject activities are items I would like to get to each week and will vary according to topic.
• We don’t read the correlated readings from Story of the World unless we are doing research for a presentation.
• (If our reading plan is too aggressive, you can check out the simpler plans here.)

Removing the “weekend reading,” “read aloud,” and “picture books/readers,” it takes about 60-90 minutes to read/do everything on the list. Even so, our family tends to “loop” the Subject Activities and Geography Practice. (In fact, if we ever fall “behind” schedule, we pretty much just pick up where we left off instead of trying to catch up.) Staying on schedule is not nearly as important to me as cultivating wonder and curiosity and a love of learning in my children, which brings me to my next point…

Create a Rhythm, Not a Strict Schedule.  Our family has certain tasks I like for us to finish daily, but you will not find us doing the same thing at the same time each day. I create plans to have a structure to reference, but if my children are super-interested in science and ask to extend an experiment, or if they want to imitate or act out something we are reading, or if they find something wonderful and beautiful about mathematics, I ditch the schedule and go with some delight-led learning. If you are new to this concept, you can find out more through the book Plan to Be Flexible (read the review here).

Block Scheduling vs. A Rotating or “Loop” Schedule. Keeping the previous  point in my mind, we use a block schedule to put structure to our planning, especially when it comes to our middle school and language arts coursework. We tend to rotate through other subjects in the afternoons. For more details about what rotating or loop scheduling is, visit this post.

Schedule for 1st & 4th Grader

Current Schedule for 7th Grader

This will likely be modified as the school year progresses, but our middle school student is finishing everything before 3PM each day, even on his distractible days. My current favorite resource for him is…Visual Latin. It includes such great explanations for each concept in Latin.

Cycle 1 Resources Activity Plan. If you use our Cycle 1 Resources Page (with weekly links to history, science, etc. resources for enrichment activities), here’s an example of how you might plan to use them over the course of a week.

Curriculum Choices. The bulk of our daily work is reading. We love reading and science, so I spend more time incorporating those activities into our school day. I am trying to make more of an effort to incorporate more fine arts study; you’ll find specific composer and art studies referenced in our reading plans.

Why did I switch Levi from Saxon to Abeka? Well, I’m not particularly fond of the grades 1-3 Saxon books, so when he begged to use a book like Stephen did his first grade year (which is still sitting on our shelves), I looked ahead to the Abeka 3 book to see if it would transition well into Saxon 5/4 when he gets to 4th grade. It will be just fine, so I said yes. He is excitedly doing his math every day now, and I can breathe a sigh of relief.

After testing poorly on last year’s spelling words, David is on hold with All About Spelling, and we are using a few other resources to see if it helps bridge the gap in his learning. Everything else is pretty routine for our family, and I am so pleased with our reading selections this year – more than I have been in any other year. This year is going to be fantastic!