In two previous "getting-started" advice columns, we've discussed, first, how to view your day as a series of blocks, and what books you might choose to begin schooling a wide range of ages together. In today's column, we'll sketch out what each day might look like, with the caveat that every family will settle into a routine that works for that family, and that it's FINE for your routines not to look like anyone else's. Another caveat is that while a picture of a napkin drawer is what I came up with to illustrate this post, in no way do I expect anyone's daily life to be anything like as tidy as that drawer. In my own life, it's the little things that keep my sanity tacked down. And let me say that if the little things keep your sanity tacked down, too, try organizing your napkin drawer so that it looks pretty. You can't control a lot of things, but if you can control the napkin drawer . . . Anyway. (Another fun fact: cheap cotton bandanas make great table napkins. You're welcome).
So what I'm going to propose here is a basic KIND of schedule that has worked in our family, with children spread out over a ten-year age range. In my mind, I'm amalgamating things we did in our first year of homeschooling with Mater Amabilis – when I had eleven- and seven-year-olds doing school, and two toddlers – with things that have worked for us since that time.
NOTE: With a number of moving parts of different ages, and with some children with executive-function issues, I have always found it harder to maintain Charlotte Mason's ideal of alternating living-books lessons with what I believe she called "disciplinary subjects" like math or foreign language. Too many transitions, in my house, make the day unmanageable in a hurry, and eat up time. This might not be the case in your house. In an ideal scenario, you would be alternating those subjects, for the very good reason of sustaining a sense of refreshment from subject to subject, so that in your day, there's never too much of one thing at one time. In my own scheduling, I've tried to keep things varied enough that we didn't get bored or fatigued, but I haven't hewed to that ideal too closely.
So, my goals here are:
*Helping you help your children transition from not-school time to school time, first thing in the day, and to ease transitions from subject to subject
*Helping you visualize how you can get in all the subjects you need to cover in a given week, with an alternating daily schedule
*Helping you to keep your school day short and efficient, to maximize free time, especially for children younger than seventh grade.
I'm not, right now, going to deal with the issue of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers in any specific way. Please understand that I understand that you probably have at least one person in at least one of those demographics in your house, and that what you see on the screen here will inevitably translate to something less tidy and more chaotic in real life. I honestly can't remember, to any great degree, what I did with my youngest children when my older children were eleven and down and doing school, but I can promise you that the whole scene was not neat and quiet and orderly.
That said, let's visualize a school day. We're picking up after breakfast and any chores or hygiene tasks that your children might perform in that block of time. This might be after you've fed the baby and read a book to the toddlers or preschoolers, too. Take your time touching base with younger children. I don't know what time it is at your house by the time you've done all that and are ready to begin school. In my house, with children in this age range, the school day might have been starting sometime between 9 and 10 a.m., but that's not set in stone for anybody else. It's just about the earliest we were ever able to get going.
1. Turn on some classical music by the composer of your choice (have a Spotify list made!), and gather anybody who can write to the table (in my house at the time, this would have been either the dining-room table or the kitchen island) for five minutes of copywork.
*Have your faster writers and independent readers bring a free-reading book to the table, and direct them that if they finish writing their selection before the timer goes, they are to read quietly until you direct them to the next thing.
*Another option here is JUST to have your youngest writers gather now, while your older children are reading quietly someplace else and/or watching babies and toddlers (okay, I'll deal with them a little!). Then have the older children do copywork and other table things later, when the younger school-agers are finished with everything.
*Five minutes would be a maximum time limit. It's amazing how long five minutes starts to feel when you have somebody who can write three words well, and that's the point when the writing starts to fall apart.
2. While people are at the table, do 10 minutes of math. You might turn the music down a little, but keep it playing unless it's too distracting.
*Again, this could be everybody, or it could just be your younger school-agers, while you wait to work with older kids later.
*Older children could still be reading to themselves right now, or watching little ones.
*If you just have younger ones, say in grades 1-3, doing math right now, you might make the lesson only 5 minutes as a maximum. In any event, DON'T drag it out. DON'T worry about finishing a whole page. Do what they can do with full attention, then stop.
3. Move to your read-aloud spot and call your older children, if they're off reading to themselves. If you haven't had family prayers and sung a hymn or chant (which could be done at the breakfast table), do that now. Next, here's where I'm going to show you how you're going to read all those books listed in the last post.
*Some people have success doing a loop schedule, where the standing assignment every day is "read three things," and tomorrow is "read the next three things." This can work. If you want to do a loop schedule, get yourself a crate that will fit all your books for the week. Arrange them in this order: one religion reading, one history reading, one geography reading. Then one more religion reading, one more history reading, one science reading. And so on, until all your books are in the basket. On Monday, take out the first religion reading, read it for five minutes, have your children narrate, and put it in the back of the basket. Then do history the same way, then geography. On Tuesday, pull out the book at the front, which should be your next religion reading, and repeat the whole process. Do the same thing every day. If you miss a day, pick up at the front of the basket the next time you sit down. If you can only get through two readings one day, pick up at the front of the basket the next time you sit down. If you do this consistently, as many days a week as possible, you will read and narrate a lot over all the core subjects and have a very rich and successful school year.
*What worked in my house, meanwhile, was to assign certain books to certain days. This particularly helped my children transition to independent reading, because it was an easy routine that they had already internalized and could learn to do themselves fairly readily. It's not better than loop scheduling, but it's what worked for me. So the week's readings would look something like this, using suggestions from the book-recommendation post referenced above:
MONDAY
1. A Life of Our Lord for Children (five-minute segment, narrated)
2. Our Island Story (five-minute segment, narrated)
3. Rocks, Rivers, and the Changing Earth (five-minute segment, narrated)
We'll repeat this basic pattern all week. Assume, for the time being, that every reading will be five minutes, and every reading will be narrated. As people's attention grows, you can expand the time. Set a timer if you need to, and be very firm about moving on. Don't let any lesson drag!
TUESDAY
1. A saint story
2. Famous Men or Children's Plutarch: Tales of the Greeks
3. Nature-lore reading (say, Life in a Bucket of Soil)
WEDNESDAY
1. Saint Patrick's Summer
2. Our Island Story
3. Paddle-to-the-Sea
THURSDAY
1. Saint story
2. EITHER Famous Men, or if you are doing Children's Plutarch, an extra day of national history
3. Story-Book of Science, or other narrated science reading
FRIDAY
1. Saint Patrick's Summer
2. a second narrated science reading (say, The Way Things Work Now, OR a human-anatomy reading)
3. An open slot where you could do a hands-on science activity or make up a reading from earlier in the week
And done. Now people can play, or have lunch, depending on what time it is.
This is a fairly bare-bones schedule that covers all core subjects but literature. IF you can manage a fourth short reading in this time slot, you can do that, but I would stick to no more than three for the sake of people's attention, especially in the beginning. If each reading takes five minutes, with, say, five minutes' narration following, this is about half an hour of concentration and sitting.
For refreshment, you can have everyone stand up between readings and stretch, touch toes, do some jumping jacks, whatever you can do to get some wiggles out. When you sit down again, you might have people do deep breathing for a minute or two to calm down, as you might before doing Lectio Divina (prayers on the Hallow app always start this way!). "Quiet your mind, get ready to listen again . . . "
4. When to do your readings for literature? Let's say it's later in the day: either you're at lunch, or it's after lunch and little children are napping or having a quiet time. (I will confess that with one of my toddlers, I enforced a nap/room time by putting a hook-and-eye closure on the outside of his door. The ONLY way to contain him was with a physical boundary that he couldn't get out of. When that boundary was enforced, he played contentedly in his room and passed out. If it wasn't enforced, he was a wired, over-exhausted maniac. You don't want someone desperately screaming while you ignore them, but if you need to, and you can enforce a physical boundary without causing distress to the child contained by that boundary, then something like that might be a good idea . . .).
*Have a second basket for literature readings. This basket should contain the following:
-one classic novel (Five Children and It, for example, appealed to a wide range of ages in my house)
-a poetry anthology (The Harp and the Laurel Wreath, A Child's Garden of Verses, When We Were Very Young)
-Aesop's Fables
-a book of fairy tales
-a book of classic myths
*Over lunch or during nap/quiet time, whichever works best for you, take out the front book in the basket and read for no more than 10 minutes (Aesop will take no more than 5 minutes at the most). Don't worry about narrating these readings. Just read and enjoy. When you finish that reading, put the book at the back of the basket. The next day, take out the next book and read. Lather, rinse, repeat.
*You could opt to do these readings at a later-afternoon snack time, too. Whatever time works best for you, as long as you touch that basket every day, is fine.
5. If your older children have been doing some work independently, and/or need your help with things like math, after lunch is also a good time to catch up with them. Call them to the table, either together or one at a time (others can be reading or having some free time while you work with one). In this initial stage, spend no more than 20 minutes on a lesson with each older child, whether they're all sitting down together, and you're moving quietly between them to help, or whether you're doing things one-on-one. Your aim at this time, as at all times, is to do what they can do with full attention, not letting them get fatigued or the lesson drag out beyond its usefulness.
6. Make bedtime count.
*I often used to read aloud to my children from the hall, once they were in bed, with their doors open. We also said our prayers this way.
*This is a great time to have a historical novel going for pleasure, or another classic novel. I wouldn't worry about having multiple things going at once for bedtime reading: just read a book until you're done, then pick the next. But as with school planning, it's good to have a list made ahead of time, for the whole year, so that you do consistently do this reading, and always know what you're going to do. If you don't read every book on the list, that's fine. But you're never caught out without a plan for that part of the bedtime routine, which to my mind is the key to making it happen.
So, let's look back at your proposed day:
Every day that you make school happen, you will have done:
-a religion reading
-a history reading
-either geography or science
-at least one work of literature
-writing (in the form of copywork, which covers a whole host of language-arts skills)
-mathematics
This is a complete school day. Right now you're lacking foreign language and some of "the riches," but possibly you can find some ways to fold those things into your home environment: label items with foreign-language vocabulary, hang up an image for picture study, have classical music playing in the house for much of the day, and invite casual conversation about the composer.
For nature study, aside from making nature lore a part of your reading during the week, you might invite children to pick their own "sit spots" in the yard, places where at least once a week they will go to sit and observe quietly, and draw or write (either right there, or when they come inside, as a narration after the fact) what they have observed from that same spot. Put up a bird feeder, if you don't have one, and observe the birds that visit it. Keep field guides handy. If you have room somewhere for a nature table, where children can bring in things they find outside, do that, and invite them to share leaves they pick up, or flowers, or feathers, or rocks, or seashells, or even bones . . .
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| An actual display in my house, even to this day (yes, I know, you're not really supposed to bring in birds' nests and keep them, but we didn't know that at the time . . . ) |
You might also encourage children to keep, or keep together, a "Book of Firsts," recording the first hummingbird of the year, the first daffodil, the first snowfall, the first tree you see with autumn colors . . . all through the year. Just keep that book on a table or in some other place where it can lie open where you'll see it and not forget about it. Add to it as you have things to add, and encourage your children to add to it.
Add to all this the rounds of daily life together, the inevitable outings you'll take together, the things your children will play and do and read on their own time, and you can see how, around this fairly simple skeleton of formal schoolwork, a whole rich education will shape itself, day to day. Try not to sweat the bad days, which will certainly happen. Everybody has them. Concentrate, instead, on going forward, day by day, and on the way that all those days will accrue into something significant. THAT is the education you're offering your children.
You are welcome to copy and paste into your own document so that you can make changes, or download as is. Please note that all of this is meant to be flexible. You may have a co-op or park day as a regular feature in your week: fine. If you miss a day of at-home formal school, even on a regular basis, that's not a big deal, especially in your first year. You could opt to move your "Friday/Day 5" routine to anyplace in the week, for example, and JUST do the religion reading for that day (and not do copywork or math), so that you can get out the door with your children. This table is just meant to suggest something you CAN do on a consistent basis, assuming that you will make whatever adjustments you need to make for your family's particular circumstances. It's better to get up and choose not to do what's on the plan that day than to get up and have no plan, but a day you have to fill somehow. Saving yourself decision fatigue on a daily basis is what will prevent your burning out. And it's what will ensure that some education happens consistently for your children, however gently and informally.