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Scheduling: How Do You Balance Flexibility with Short Lessons?
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Hi there,
I am very new to CM – we’ve not even put it into practice yet! I’m a big scheduler but got away from that after finding our family (3 boys with various special needs) needs more flexibility. I love the idea of short lessons and enthusiastically began putting together a table in 15 minute increments and pasting all of our future curriculum in. I then realized this looked like total overkill and the airy and light feel of CM’s nature walks felt totally obliterated! How do you balance short lessons with begin outside and being flexible? I feel like my schedule is going to tie us to a table with a timer :(. I saw sample schedules online here but none of them have time increments. Thanks so much!!! So glad I found this forum!
Hi Cindy! Welcome! 🙂 Charlotte Mason’s scheduled lessons for the morning and children had the afternoons off to enjoy more relaxed ways of learning and just being kids.
I’ve had to choose between working continuously on lessons through the morning (as CM did) or being more relaxed and having lessons take longer, with more breaks in between. I think it all depends on your goals for your family and what works best for your children and yourself. I’ve found it best to work in the mornings and have afternoons free as Charlotte Mason did. Since, she designed her lessons to be short and interesting, they don’t feel burdensome or drag out. She also recommended that we order our children’s lessons so that they are using different parts of the brain at different times and not exhausting themselves. For instance, one might do Bible and then math, composer study, then copywork, then history, etc. Things remain interesting and fresh when we switch them up in this manner.
I found it very helpful to look at the schedules for Charlotte Mason’s schools and use them for a guide line.
However, some children may do better with short breaks between subjects and a more relaxed, free flowing day. In the end, it’s whatever works for your family that is best. 🙂
Here’s a link to a blog post that has been a big help and inspiration to me on the topic of scheduling.
http://fillingmymap.com/2015/04/15/11-ways-finlands-education-system-shows-us-that-less-is-more/
That’s a great article, Melanie! I’ve long admired Finland’s educational system but her personal experience and insights reaffirmed what I’ve always appreciated.
I enjoyed the article as well Robin but I linked the wrong web page! Lol. That was a link that I forwarded to my homeschool group. I meant to copy and paste a different link and didn’t even notice my mistake.
If only the U.S. could bring true educational reform and do something similar to Finland’s educational system-or even better use CM methods!
Here is the blog post I meant to link to the first time. 🙂
http://afterthoughtsblog.net/2014/06/secrets-from-charlotte-mason-on.html
I just printed that article for my homeschool binder!
We’ve done a variety of schedules over the years. Things that work well are alternating types of lessons, taking a short break for a snack or some simple exercises, and sticking with short lessons. Most people schedule Apologia 2x per week, but I found we did best with shorter daily lessons…this goes for other subjects as well. A few years ago we went through the Swimming Creatures book and I couldn’t believe the difference. I would keep an eye on how focused they were during the lessons and there was a point when I lost their attention. Once we switched to shorter, daily lessons, this quit happening completely. I had their undivided attention for the entire lesson!
If your children are struggling with something in particular, play around with the lesson length or time of day you schedule it. We recently moved math to our first lesson of the day (instead of our last), and it’s made a huge difference in how long it takes them to finish. My oldest quit starting at her math page with a blank look on her face for 20 minutes! It also did wonders for her “I can’t do this” attitude.
At times we’ve taken lots of breaks throughout our lessons and spent 9:00 to 4:30 on school. This works well when we have a baby in the house….I can work around the baby’s schedule this way. Other times we’ve used the school in the morning, free time in the afternoon approach. We are currently doing our schoolwork in the afternoons so I can get our house unpacked in the mornings when I have the most energy. I do think morning lessons work the best, so I’m looking forward to going back to that schedule in a few months.
You only need to use the timer if you aren’t sure how long something is actually taking. Once you get a feel for how long a subject should take, you shouldn’t have to rely on it too much. If something is taking too long on a regular basis, shorten the lessons. You can always add a 2nd lesson later than day or increase the number of lessons for that particular subject throughout the week. You can also lengthen the time you’ll spend on that book. You don’t have to finish a curriculum in one year or one term just because it’s generally done that way. 😉
I hope these help you! This is something we’ve struggled with and it seems the more I stick to CM’s methods, the smoother things go!
Hahaha! That’s hilarious! I’m glad you made the mistake. I forwarded the post to my CM group. But my friend, Christy, has lots of great things to say in the other article as well. She is a member of my library and leads our CM group. Her “barefoot boy” and my boys are great friends. Nancy Kelly’s admonition to “keep cutting back till you have peace in your home” really resonated with her. Also, Sonya’s CD on “less is more” is excellent. We need this hammered in from all directions until we believe it. We are so conditioned to believe the opposite and we are paying the price.
Wow, I am blown away at the quick (and helpful!) responses! So excited to be a part of this community.
Thank you for all you said and the resources (I, too, admire Finland’s school system!).
This does clear things up but one last detail – when you’re doing nature walks, does that count as a 15 minute block or is that casual in the afternoon? I know at first I’ll need the timer but hopefully it will smooth into a “flow”.
My other question was on narration – is narration a part of the time block?
We do most of our nature walks on the weekend as a family thing. Usually taking a hour or 2. I don’t think I’ve ever timed a nature walk. And I do believe that narration is included in the time. So it shouldn’t take longer than 15 min to read a bit and narrate.
We just came in from our nature walk. We spent an hour-ish today and that included our nature journals. We don’t always draw. Our nature time is very casual usually.
I include narration in the time block. So if we have history for, say, 20 minutes, that would include all aspects of the lesson…maybe a brief recap from last time, today’s reading and narration.
Oh, and welcome! 🙂
Robin-I have Sonya’s Less is More talk on cd and I love it! I get to hear it in person at convention next month. 🙂
How nice to know Christy in person. How I wish that we had more of a CM community in my small town.
Yes-we need to hear this as much as possible, I agree. 🙂
Cindy-we do nature study on Fridays during our school day. After accomplishing a week’s worth of school, I feel good about taking a bit of extra time for nature study. 🙂 We take walks outdoors nearly every day and do quite a bit of our schooling outside. I also try to include visits to nature parks, boat rides on lakes and rivers, long bike rides on nature trails on weekends and vacations as much as possible.
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