Typical Daily Schedule

My 6th grader has between 3 and 4 hours because of all the reading she does plus family readings in history, scriptures, etc. In 4th it was less, 2-3 hours. My younger six kiddos are 2nd grade on down and lesons max out at 2 hours total usually for a day.

Here are the questions that help me when planning out schedules:

– What subjects need done this year?

– How often do we need to do them in a week?

– Are those short lessons like Charlotte Mason advised??? {Very important! If you want the broad range of subjects you’re going to have to stick to short lessons or you will burn out the kids and yourself.}

– Are there subjects here that this child or our family do not need at this time?

– Have I prayed about it all?

Another thing that helps me is to combine as many subjects into one assignment as possible. So I don’t usually give separate reading, writing, and literature assignments on a weekly basis on top of our reading, narration, and notebooking for history/science. Once a week I may give a writing assignment, maybe once every 2 weeks, but the notebooking my child does daily in other areas is writing practice, grammar, spelling, etc.

My early elementary kids were usually done by around noon – perhaps a 2-3 hour school day, keeping all their lessons fairly short. The length of the day seems to grow as they approach the end of elementary school, until we’re schooling from about 9-2:30 or 3, with a morning snack time and a lunch break and some outside time at noon. I was concerned about this in light of CM’s recommendation that each child should spend afternoons outside/free, until our local study group’s leader reminded me that CM’s students went to school on Saturday as well as M-F. We follow a four-day school week, so our times made sense in light of this.