That shy, elusive creature: the perfect lesson plan
Now, I will be the first to admit that I am not naturally a good lesson planner, and that if I plan well at all, it's the fruit of seventeen years of trial and error, and just as I'm getting good at it, my last children go and graduate on me. God willing.
Nevertheless, a few things have helped me over the years as I've worked to translate what's on the Mater Amabilis syllabus into what actually happens in my home, day in and day out, for something resembling a plausible school year. Well, really, one thing has helped me, and that is: visualization. If I can map out visually, in some way, how things are going to go, then that's what moves me from total mind-blank to the beginning of a workable plan.
Pretty much any booklist will work with my methods. I do usually revise the MA booklists to make use of things I already have on my shelf, or to substitute free online living public-domain resources, such as you might find at Gateway to the Classics or Heritage History.
But let's say you are using MA's syllabus, which has books broken down by subject. Even if you're going to substitute some things, working with what's already there gives you a good template to start with. Following this kind of template, actually, even if you're not following a specific curriculum to the letter, will give you a good education, year in and year out, if what you fill into each slot is a living book or resource.
Just how excellent the education is really depends on how readily you can discern what a living book or resource is, and how demanding you are about what you offer. The structure I'm about to sketch out is the kind of structure that would enable you to spread a wide and varied feast for your child, full of refreshment and opportunity for a bigger vision of what there is to know and find out.
Caveat: you could follow this structure and do something meh, if you settle for meh books and resources. The shape by itself won't pull the whole educational freightload. You have to be discerning, even finicky, about the quality of the books you set out as part of this feast. On the other hand, you can choose really good books and still not have a terribly edible feast – too much of one course, too little of another. Too heavy a flavor here, not enough salt there. So the structure does matter.
This, again, is basically MA's structure, but you could use it as a template for writing your own customized plan if you wanted to do that.
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
-catechism 1x weekly
NB: I stopped doing catechism as a discrete assignment in high school this last time around. For children who have had intensive catechesis their entire lives, there is such a thing as burnout. So we have focused more on primary-source saints' writings, scripture study, and papal encyclicals, as well as daily living of our faith.
-saints 2x weekly
-Bible 2x weekly
ENGLISH/LANGUAGE ARTS
-grammar and composition 4x weekly
In Mater Amabilis, in the elementary and middle-school levels, this means Primary Language Lessons, Intermediate Language Lessons, and Lingua Mater. In high school, formal composition is scheduled once a week, with daily written narrations and longer finished essays periodically. You CAN just do narration, copywork, and dictation and call it a day, which is in fact what we have often done, prior to high school.
-copywork 5x weekly
-studied dictation (starting around age 10) 1-2x weekly
ENGLISH/LITERATURE
-classic literature as free reading, but I always had some novel going
as a read-aloud at least 2-3x weekly, at lunch
-Shakespeare 1x weekly (again, at lunch, usually)
-poetry: 1 poem every week or so, but we worked daily at memorizing
HISTORY
-national history 2x weekly
-world history 2x weekly
-in high school we also do Church history 1x weekly (often alternating with another reading, because the book set for that history stream is fairly light)
GEOGRAPHY
-travel and exploration 1-2x weekly
-map work 1x weekly (I often folded this in as preparation for a reading, rather than making it a separate lesson)
-geology/earth studies 1x weekly
SCIENCE AND NATURE STUDY
-nature walk/notebooking 1x weekly (this can be very informal and unschooled, and can happen in your yard as easily as anywhere else)
-readings in science 2-3x weekly
-hands-on activity 1x weekly (as you can)
FOREIGN LANGUAGE
-I'd list this as daily, because you won't learn if you don't practice daily. But in small increments, 5-10 minutes maximum for younger children. It shouldn't take up a huge block of time
MATHEMATICS
-daily
PICTURE STUDY
1x weekly, though what this means in reality is hanging up an image where everyone will see it for two weeks, then at some point when a child isn't looking at it, having them narrate it to you. I typically have changed images every two weeks following Ambleside Online's rotations.
MUSIC STUDY
The MA syllabus says 1x weekly, though how I have usually addressed this is to have classical music playing, by a given artist or of a given era – since usually a Spotify playlist, for example, will include more than one artist. But you can also watch a YouTube together, per AO's composer rotations, once a week.
ART
Again, the MA syllabus says 2x weekly, but we mostly ad libbed this and/or made use of outside art classes. But you can use a curriculum like Artistic Pursuits OR YouTube tutorials once or twice a week together if you want a more formal course at home.
HANDIWORK/PRACTICAL WORK
This can be pretty ad-lib and can include craft skills like crochet, knitting, sewing, embroidery, leatherwork, beadwork, woodworking, and so on, but also general household handiness.
So . . . the above represents the template for an excellent broad education and can be flexed for any age, especially with attention to the various notes I made. If you want to know what a good education should include year by year, these are the broad categories, each with several moving parts inside it.
How do you turn that template into a lesson plan?
1. Choose your books.
Again, for any of this to be of value, they have to be living books. Accept no substitutes.
If in doubt, follow the curriculum. Follow Mater Amabilis. It's there to be used. People have thought through the book choices. You can save yourself a huge amount of decision fatigue just by deciding to follow the curriculum.
2. Plan the flow of your school days.
a. It's helpful for me to make a calendar of a week (any week), using a grid like this one. Note that this grid is blank and can be copied and pasted into a typable document for your own use.
b. Fill in the grid with the books associated with each subject, the number of times in the week that the syllabus indicates, like so. Here again, you're welcome to copy and paste this into a typable document and mess around with it all you like. Plugging in your actual books – for example, Our Island Story for national history – will give you a picture, at a glance, of what exactly you'd be reading and doing each day.
c. Adjust. You know your child. You know yourself. You know when you're likely to hit overload. It is okay to cut things back.
*I always cut formal grammar and composition before I cut anything else. Excellent reading, narration, and copywork are really enough. You can informally teach younger children parts of speech and what you need to make a complete sentence, which is truly all they need to begin to use language well, which is really the point – not to be "good at grammar."
*I always looked at what I could unschool.
**Nature study never happened very formally, for example, though we spent a lot of time outside, and on their own my children did things like turn over bricks edging the garden beds to see what was living under them. I did usually include some reading in nature lore one day a week in the science "line item," and that often seemed to plant the necessary seeds for children's own outdoor explorations.
**Picture study meant hanging up an image where everybody would see it
** Composer study meant music playing, me pointing out the composer and era
**Anything that could be moved to an "enjoyment-only" slot – chiefly literature – was moved there, to minimize our formal sit-down school day.
SO . . . everything on that grid will not represent a traditional school class lasting an hour. Depending on your child's age, each slot might take five or ten minutes, or twenty, or thirty. High-school students may be expected to spend more like an hour on a subject every time it comes up, but younger children should spend no longer on a given subject than their attention span. Even if you have many things on the schedule for that day, you still should be able to finish within a couple of hours if you have children third grade or younger, simply because you shouldn't be spending longer than 20 minutes at the MOST on any lesson (and copywork, for example, at any age is more like 5 minutes).
How does this translate into what I actually do every day?
Again, most of the Mater Amabilis levels have you covered. Readings are broken down by week for a 36-week school year, and all you have to do is divide that amount by however many times in a week you're reading a given book. If you're reading a chapter of Our Island Story every week, then you divide that in two, and read half on one day, half on the other.
You can do this with any book, of course. Say you want every twelfth week, i.e. the last week of a 12-week term, to be an exam or makeup week: that leaves you 33 weeks in the school year. Divide a given book's page count by 33, and that tells you roughly how many pages you need to read in a week to finish the book in a year.
Note that this doesn't tell you how quickly or slowly you'll actually be able to READ the book. You may find, in reality, that you need to offer smaller amounts, at least to begin with, for your student to narrate well. That's FINE. The point really isn't to get through the book or to know everything in it, so much as it is to learn to read with engagement and to narrate so that you retain what you've read. This ultimately does translate into knowing a lot, but the ultimate objective is knowing HOW to know a lot about whatever you might need to learn.
You can also make yourself a daily-list-style plan. The Mater Amabilis high school plans (accessed via the Levels 5-6 link on the MA site) include a 180-day plan for each subject for each year, which might provide a template for those of you who like to follow lists.
Again, if you're looking at this grid, and you know approximately how many pages you'll need to read each time you read a given book, you can simply start to make yourself a 180-day list (and the standing plan, no matter when you might have to miss a day or days, is "do the next day.")
I do usually break my days down into weeks (as in Week 1, Week 2, etc), but what I'm paying attention to are the days, 1-180, at the end of which the year is over. I also think about the flow of the day: what do I want to start with, how are we going to transition smoothly from one thing to the next. My plan might look like:
Week 1
Day 1:
1. copywork (I like to start with copywork!)
2. math Lesson 1 (we're still at the table, so why not)
3. catechism pp. 1-5
4. Language Lessons, Lesson 1
5. World History pp. 1-5 N
6. Travel/Exploration book pp. 1-5 N + map
7. put up picture for picture study & call attention to it
8. Lunch reading: "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," Minimus I, story + vocabulary
Day 2:
1. copywork
2. math Lesson 2
3. saints pp 1-3
4. Language Lessons Lesson 2
5. National History pp. 1-5
6. Science pp. 1-5
7. Art lesson
8. Lunch reading: The Secret Garden, Chapter 1, Minimus I, grammar, review vocabulary
Day 3:
1. copywork
2. math lesson 3
4. Bible, Genesis 1
5. World History, pp. 6-10
6. Geography, Earth studies, pp. 1-5
7. Composer study: Brahams German Requiem (1 movement)
8. Lunch reading: As You Like It, Act I, Minimus I, cultural notes, review vocabulary
Day 4:
1. copywork
2. math lesson 4
3. saints, pp. 4-6
4. Language Lesson 3
5. National History, pp. 6-10
6. Science: vinegar-in-egg experiment (note what book, what page)
7. Art lesson
8. Lunch reading: Myth of Dedalus and Icarus pp. 12-14, review Minimus vocabulary
Day 5:
1. copywork
2. math lesson 5
3. Matthew 1
5. Language Lesson 4
6. Church history pp. 1-5
7. Outside for nature study (or a nature-lore reading)
8. Lunch reading: Novel, review Minimus vocabulary
And so on. Week 2 would begin with Day 6, Week 3 with Day 11, etc.
I would set myself a limit: no more than 8 things on the list for a day, and for elementary ages, no thing lasting more than 20 minutes, inclusive of narration. For math and grammar lessons, I would just hold very strictly to a time limit, stop and move on to the next one. There's no law that says you have to do every single problem or exercise. Always stop before your child's attention wanes. If your child is not paying full attention, he's not learning, and pushing past that limit is a waste of time.
Notice that I've just made up things (like "vinegar-egg experiment," though that is a real thing) to demonstrate the level of specificity that you want in a daily 180-day plan. It doesn't help you just to write "do experiment." In the heat of the moment, you won't remember what that meant, and you won't do it. The more specifically you can sketch out procedures (where is the egg, where is the vinegar, where are you going to do the experiment), the better. This is doubly true if you are making checklists for your kids to use independently. Instead of "Our Island Story, pp. 6-12," write:
1. Our Island Story: in your book bin
2. Read pp. 6-10
3. Return the book to your bin
4. Come to me and narrate.
It's always good to have a format you can tweak and annotate, too. I use Google Docs and transfer plans week by week onto a blog for my high-schoolers to access. Watch this space if you want to see how that's going to unfold. I have all 180 days planned out, but can alter things add notes, cut, paste, and otherwise change, week by week, without having to make it all up on the spot.
In summary:
In summary:
Obviously what I've just told you is how I plan. This may not be how you plan. All I can really tell you is what works for me, but you will have to experiment to see what works for you. I can't use big nice print/hard-copy planners, for example, but maybe you can. I don't bullet journal, because I lose journals. Maybe you love to bullet journal and actually keep up with things.
But my hope is that you've found something here you can turn to your own use – at the very least, a way to move past the block of "that huge syllabus oh no," or "so many books oh no," or "what do you even do in fourth grade oh no" . . .
I hope you're able to move past whatever's blocking you, to make a step in the direction of having a plan. The more plan you work on, the more you have a plan to work, day to day, and that's how you get through the year.
STILL MORE: To understand the why behind the structure and book choices proposed on the blog, visit the whole 20 Principles Series.