Short Lessons and Too Many Subjects to Fit in Schedule

Are you spreading the subjects out over the week, Sharon? Remember that you don’t have to do every subject every day. For example, picture study can be done once a week. Music study can be done once a week. (Or do you mean instrument practice for “music”?) Spelling/dictation can be done once or twice a week.

30-45 minutes would be max for that age group, but not all subjects will take that long. Copywork, dictation, picture study, poetry are a few subjects that would take less time.

If it helps, I have an 8th and a 10th grader this year.  We do these daily for 30 to 45 minutes:  math, Latin, Apologia science.  We do a language arts activity every day–dictation, written narrations or essays.  We do our other languages every day but for only about 20 minutes (Spanish, French) Everything else is spread out–we probably average one other “family” slot per day (composer study, artist study, Plutarch, etc.) We do poetry every day, but only read one poem or a couple of segments of a longer poem.  When we are learning typing we do it 3 times per week.  Most other things we only do once a week–the kids do a geography reading, a  history reading, etc.  on their own.  They usually have about two of these things per day.  So we end up spending about five hours for the older kids (younger take less).