Weekly Schedule planning

I know exactly what you are looking for, I cannot find it either since the curriculum guide changed. Maybe one of the SCM staff will chime in. You may try searching the learning library, I was able to find some old book lists in there that used to be on the planning guide. Although many of the links now point to the new info. Good luck. I also relied heavily on the free planning tools and feel like a floundering fish withouth them.

I don’t  think it is on purpose.  I think they are working on some changes and some things are getting mislaid or something.  I thought I was looking  at schedules last night but it was through a forum search I did   on the free curriculum guide.

Okay, I finally have some time to talk about our goals with the recent changes.

We have three kinds of resources available for a CM education.

• Lots of free information for a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach, including the pages that were called the free curriculum guide, hundreds of articles, videos, and some free e-books.
• Individual books, videos, and audios you can buy to use in your schooling as you like.
• A set of lesson plan books that provide a complete Charlotte Mason-style curriculum through daily, open-and-go plans.

The way we had previously presented these was to put the DIY materials out front and then mention that if you wanted more guidance we had the lesson plan books available. We also sort of approached it by pointing to a bunch of learning about CM you could do to prepare to get started.

Our assumption was that most visitors to our site were like us and many of you and wanted a DIY approach. But over the last several months we have discovered that our assumption was wrong.

We have learned that the majority of new homeschoolers coming to our site want the planning done for them and they want to get started right away without having to learn a bunch of prerequisites.

We have also learned that most homeschoolers didn’t even know we had a full CM curriculum available. It’s been kind of disheartening to see bloggers writing about CM curriculum options and leave SCM out of the list so many times, for example.

Now, we DIY folks are usually willing to do a little digging and work to put together what we want. But those who want more guidance are looking for a clearly-presented plan they can find and grasp right away.

So we decided to flip-flop the way we presented things. The free DIY plans are still there, but the lesson plan books are what you see first when you look at our curriculum options. Those books introduce CM concepts as you go so a newbie can jump right in and get going, while still enjoying the richness of a CM education. And the deeper learning materials are still available for when she’s ready.

You’ll notice that we also changed our top-level menu to read “Our Curriculum” to make what we offer more obvious.

We know some of you were shocked when you saw that the original intro page content had been replaced because it made it look like the free options were gone. However, most of the things that page had linked to were still there. For example, if you click the Grades 1–12 Overview link under the Our Curriculum menu, you’ll find the chart linking to all of the subjects pretty much as it was before.

One exception is the page of living science resources. I explained the reasons for that change over in another forum discussion.

We do apologize that during this short transition some of the DIY pages became much harder to find.

But we are now pleased to announce that you’ll find a new Build Your Own Curriculum page listed under the Our Curriculum menu. It is an improved page just for a DIY approach that gathers links to all of the free stuff together in one place. It also includes some new and updated information.

There was also a new SCM Curriculum FAQ page added during the reorganization that some of you may find helpful.

I hope that clears things up. Do any of you still have any questions I haven’t answered? As always, we value your feedback!

Thanks, Jamie. We have reworded our pages in a few places to make it clearer that the books are guides to other resources that will also need to be obtained. We’re constantly on the lookout now for other places where we can add clarity.

I think it was a wise change too. I went with Sonlight my first year because I didn’t know ya’ll had the full guides etc. After one year with Sonlight, I became a DIY. So now I piece meal what works for us and I found I don’t follow other peoples guides well, but had I started with you guys, I think I probably would have stuck with it being it is more laid back.  I recommend you guys and the organizer to every new homeschooler I meet!

Doug – Thank you so much for explaining things.  I love how open + honest you guys always are and it shows through everything you do.  Blessings!!

I was so pleased to find the Build Your Own Curriculum page exists because I have enjoyed the simplicity of following the 3 steps–Bible/History/Geography, Enrichments, Individuals and have everything I needed laid out for me. Having embraced CM’s methods I appreciated being able put it into action for the kids (we have six). We are about to start our fourth year homeschooling so I’ve gained confidence in tweaking according to what works for our family but a go-to guide full of living book suggestions for each grade has been very helpful for organizing and I like printing out the Plan Your Year worksheet each year and filling it out with a friend who has also gone CM. Thanks for your hard work! Great resource, beautiful materials and helpful staff! Also, the links to Enrichment Studies 3 and 4 suggestions are not coming up. I would like to see the suggested literature lists in particular for grades 7-9 and 10-12.