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Daily scheduling of all these books
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I’m wondering the best way to schedule all the books I want the kids and I to read!? We have our literature books (Little House on the Prairie), the Holling C Holling books I want to read for geography, the Clara Dillingham Pierson books I want to read for science, the Millers books I want to read for character, the books TruthQuest recommends for our history program, not to mention the individual reading my 9yo will do a bit of, etc. etc., etc.
I keep stumbling across these great living books I’d like to fit into our reading time, but how do we do that? Do you all read from 5+ living books per day on top of doing any hands-on studies on these subjects?
We have a handful of readings we do each day; we schedule many things once a week, and so for example on one day my son might read a nature study chapter, a history chapter, and a literature book; the next day perhaps he’ll read a different literature book, a geography book, and work on a historical fiction novel; the next day a few other things. This is the biggest part of our school day outside of math and foreign language work; we schedule in much of our language arts around the books we read.
My kids are younger and as of yet don’t do any independent reading, so you can take this for what it’s worth, but we don’t read/do every subject everyday either, and some subjects are sprinkled throughout the day at other times so we don’t have one huge long block of time spent on school. Subjects we do daily are: Bible, history, literature,poetry, math, phonics/spelling, and copywork. Science/nature we do around 3x per week (2 of those are readings from living books and once is a nature walk and journal entry), and the rest only 1x/week – character/personal development, geography, and artist study. However, Bible we do together as a family in the form of Bible readings at breakfast and bedtime, and literature in the form of story time after lunch and at bedtime. So during our formal “school time” we read a poem (takes less than 5 minutes), read and narrate history, do math, spelling/phonics, and copywork, and then do 1 more reading/narration session either on nature/science or one of our weekly subjects. We don’t do a ton of hands-on projects (just not my thing…the kids do plenty of creative stuff in their free time), but when we do, I intentionally schedule that at the end of our time so that if the project takes on a life of it’s own, it doesn’t take away time from our basics, if that makes sense. That’s why things like nature journals, art, etc are at the end of our formal school time. I’m sure our days will look different as the kids get older and doing more time on independent work and longer hours on school overall…but hopefully that gives you some ideas. At any rate, there is no need to put pressure on yourself to do readings from every subject everyday – I used to be an elementary classroom teacher and we didn’t do every subject everyday either, so don’t be afraid you are short-changing your kids by choosing to do certain subjects only once or twice a week.
Jen
This is how we schedule the readings:
-in the morning, we read parts of 2-3 living books as part of our morning family studies. Right now we are reading a book about Mozart and a book about the Liberty Tree. We only read a few pages a day of each book, to make it last several weeks.
-in the afternoon my 10YO does his independent reading. He’s reading Amos Fortune right now.
-in the evening, before bed, my DH does the literature reading selection with them. They’ve decided to work their way through all 15 Wizard of Oz books, so they are on book 6.
So…
The morning family time takes about 20 minutes in the morning. My DS’s independent reading is about 20 minutes in the afternoon, and DH reads to them for about 20 minutes at night.
I guess that will make it easier – the fact that even though history will be done every day, science reading will probably only be a couple times a week, and geography probably only once a week. It just seems like my “to-read” list keeps getting longer and longer. 🙂 Thanks for your examples of your days and how you do things!!
What helps me keep it manageable and on track, is using SCM’s. “Planning Your CM Education.” This helps us to plan out our days/weeks (downloadable schedules). As far as how many books to schedule, I plan out at the beg. of the year how often I want them to read/me to read in each subject and then look through all the books and see how long each will take. If I have too many, I may drop some (and if I just don’t want to miss it, maybe add it to their ‘free read’ basket for before bedtime). HTH some:) Gina
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