Hi Wings2Fly! 🙂 First of all, I want to be clear that we’ve only been implementing this particular schedule for a few months now. I am certainly not an expert in the area of scheduling. We’ve been doing these subjects on these days for a while now, but the timing has varied. I finally decided to make a stricter schedule because my daughter’s dawdling was dragging our day out too much. We have some afternoon engagements on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and I really wanted her to be done with school beforehand. Too many things get left undone when we don’t stick with a stricter schedule in my home.
Another huge inspiration was this post:
http://afterthoughtsblog.net/2014/06/secrets-from-charlotte-mason-on.html
I also want to add that I am down to homeschooling one child, as is the author of the blog post linked above. I know homeschooling multiples makes life much more complicated. I think Christy answers most of your questions in her blog post but I’ll give my answers here as well though they mostly line up with hers. 🙂
For the first week or so, I watched the clock a bit to make sure we were keeping on track. Once we got used to doing subjects in a more timely manner, I found things fell into their time slots fairly naturally.
I use a timer for the subjects that have the propensity to go over their allotted time. For math I’ve been setting a timer for years so that was nothing new to our homeschool. We’ve also used a timer for literature and violin/piano practice for a while now. Most of the other subjects fit quite neatly into their allotted time slots. In fact, we finish quite a few of them in less than 20 minutes and that gets us ahead of schedule a bit. This is handy when something else puts us behind schedule. I find it all evens out pretty well in the end. One of our science selections has rather lengthy chapters so we time that reading as well. We simply close the book and pick up where we left off the next day(or the next time that particular subject is scheduled).
I get up at 6 and my daughter gets up at 7 most days. That gives us a couple of hours to wake up, have devotions, eat breakfast and walk the dog before school starts.
There are still days when we get way off track and don’t stick to our schedule. Life happens. However the schedule has been a huge blessing because it has helped us to accomplish so much more than we ever have before. Things get left off when the day stretches out too much.
This kind of schedules requires keeping a view of the big picture in mind. It’s okay if my daughter doesn’t finish her math book this year. She is working at a good pace and I have am working with the end in mind-having my child actually understand math, not just moving her through curriculum. I feel the same way about all of her subjects. I am not focusing so much on what we get done this year (although I do have term goals and yearly goals for our homeschool), but on all the wonderful relations my daughter will form over the years.
Having said that, I still think we will finish our plans for the year in a timely manner. I just can’t make that my focus.
