PLANNING NOTES

 We're going to the beach, and this is my packing process. There is a metaphor here. (Also, if you're into clothes and thrifting and making an effort about your appearance, I have a "style" in big scare quotes blog, too. I'm just kind of driven to keep making blogs where I talk to myself). 

This time of year, in the Mater Amabilis Facebook group, every mother's thoughts turn to school planning. Actually, from now on, my thoughts should turn to other things, because my two youngest children are now officially high-school graduates. But I don't mind talking about planning with other people who are still in the thick of it. It took me years to hit on a system that worked for me, and for what it's worth, I will share it here as well as in that group. Please note that the levels and syllabi referenced here are for Mater Amabilis, but the basic process would work for any Charlotte Mason program. 

**After resisting, for a long time, this level of commitment, I started planning for the entire school year. It was the key to keeping us in the road when we were all worn out. Investing a huge amount of my time in the summer in doing this meant that we had a successful year.

I will say on the front end, too, that I'm glad I did this, even in seasons when we had lots of interruptions. It took a lot of trial and error to find a way to plan that gave me a plan when I was too exhausted and stressed to plan, but didn't force me into some kind of rigid box or stress me out about keeping up with the plan. In other words, I had to figure out a way to lay plans that let us pick up with the next thing when we were ready, and not a minute before, but when we were ready, the plan was there. It was not something I had to think about on top of whatever else I was also thinking about at the time. 

Here are the keys to making it work FOR ME. I'm not saying my way will work for anyone else, but that this was what made the difference for me between non-success/frustration and success:

*NO DATES on anything. NO TYING ANY DAY TO ANY LITURGICAL FEAST, ETC. I could do that in the moment, but if I tried to plan my year closely around the actual calendar, with dates, and then we got off because we missed a day: collapse.

*Realizing that a 36-week/180-day school year does NOT have to mean "formal education is happening every prescribed minute of every one of those 180 days."

*Because of the above realization, building in plenty of flexible time. For example, for my just-graduated seniors, I divided readings and other work into 30 weeks, with "essay weeks," which could turn into makeup weeks if we needed them, at every 6-week mark. This meant some trimming (but I was making up my own syllabus for them anyway, since we were creating the revised high school plans as they were actually in high school, and also doing a lot of dual enrollment), AND some heavier readings where I thought they could handle them, in the weeks when we were "on," but it worked out really well for us.

This is my method:

1. Look at the syllabus. NOT the 36-week lesson-plan grid on the MA site, but the actual syllabus for your level and year (again, you should be looking at something that looks like this)

2. Note all the books on the list for each subject. NOTE ALSO that each book, unless it's a free-read, is scheduled to be read A CERTAIN NUMBER OF TIMES EACH WEEK. This is crucial. It's the key to making those grid lesson plans work. In other words, the lesson-plan grid tells you roughly how many pages you want to cover for a week, but the syllabus tells you over how many days you will divide that weekly page count.

Incidentally, one advantage of following a curriculum like Mater Amabilis is that someone has done the work for you of dividing a book out over the number of weeks (36, or for some books, 72) you're going to be reading it. Someone has also done the work of determining what's a reasonable load for a child of a given age, day to day. If you are inventing your own curriculum, these are things you'll need to do for yourself, which is not impossible, but it's sure nice to be able to lean into someone else's work and just go with it. If you are making your own curriculum for your children, it may still be useful to look at something like Mater Amabilis or Ambleside Online to gauge how much is being expected at a certain level, so that you don't under-expect or overload.  

3. I make myself a form that looks like this (this is linked in the sidebar here as well, and you are welcome to copy and paste for your own use).

4. Into this form I start adding books from the syllabus for each subject. If a history book is meant to be read twice a week, I put it in, usually on alternating days (national history M-W, world history T-Th, or whatever, just so the same book doesn't follow on itself two days in a row). I do this until I've added all the books I'm going to use. This gives me a rough outline of what my child will be reading every day. (I also just add in things like math and copywork daily – so it's those daily things + whatever reading is up for the day).

5. I consider how much I actually want to do in a formal school day. For each level, for the formal-school part of the day, I would aim for copywork + math + other language arts (but I dropped formal language arts a lot) +

Level 1B: 2-3 readings

Level 1A: 3 readings

Level 2: 3 readings

Level 3: 4 readings

Level 4: 4-5 readings

Levels 5-6: 5-6 readings.

For younger kids, I usually aimed to have, in the FORMAL part of the day, a religion reading, a history reading, and either geography or science.

We read literature for pleasure over breakfast, over lunch, at a break in the afternoon, at bedtime. I might start our school day briefly with a poem or fable, but tales, myths, novels, Shakespeare – we mostly did those outside the bounds of the formal day, as things we did for fun, not lessons, at least until Level 3.

6. So then I'd have an idea of what was supposed to happen every day in terms of both school and pleasure reading. I did include free reading on my chart, with a list for each child, to be read at the child's own pace (for some kids I didn't have to schedule free reading to make it happen; for some kids I did have to schedule "read a free reading book for 30 minutes" daily).

Basically, if it was going to happen consistently, it HAD to be on the schedule. I was NOT going to remember it past the first week. I could NOT carry all that detail in my head. The schedule had to carry the detail.

7. I could use the grid that shows the weekly breakdown for each reading (I usually made my own, because I subbed a lot), to give me an idea of the pace I wanted to set in each book. I just knew that that page/chapter count would be broken over however many readings I'd scheduled the book. But the thing I really consistently paid attention to was that daily reading list I'd made for myself, because no matter what, the standing assignment was always "read the next thing and narrate."

8. Where the grid WAS really useful to me was in keeping track of where we were in a given book. As I assigned that reading for the week (Chapter 1, broken over 2 days, or whatever), I would shade in that cell in the grid. I would not shade in the next cell until I was ready to assign the next section, which meant we were done with the last shaded section.

So we could skip a day, we could slow down, we could get "off" in terms of what week it was "supposed" to be in that book – I always knew where we were, and when we were moving forward.

9. I DID NOT CARE WHETHER THE WEEKS ALL LINED UP. It did not matter. We went faster in some books, slower in others. It did not have to be neat. I just used the grid to help me remember where we were, because I would not remember without that help, and I would be lost and flounder, and we would all go under.

10. I always knew when I wanted to begin the year, so that we could finish by the end of May at the latest and have a summer vacation. I know this is not psychologically important to some people, but it was massively psychologically important to me. I always had a "begin" date and at least a rough end-date goal in my mind. I knew we had to move forward and not bog down too much, even though we could (and inevitably did) slow down and speed up at different places in the year.

11. Again, I hadn't keyed anything to any date. I didn't have any kind of goal for being at a certain place in a book by Thanksgiving, or Advent, or whatever, because I knew I'd drive myself insane trying to line things up. I might back off some in Advent with younger children (though it did NOT work for me AT ALL to take the whole of Advent completely off school – I know some people like to do that, but it did not work in my house), and add in seasonal books to enjoy outside our school time – stuff like that.

But basically, we just moved forward at our own pace, with some flex time built in so that if it was Thanksgiving, I could take that week off if I needed to (just moving my flex week to that week and not taking a flex week when it actually came up on my grid).

And again, we did not move at the same pace in every book. We were frequently in Week 7 in one book and Week 5 in another and Week 9 in yet another. As long as we did finish the book, I didn't care about that. It did not all have to be neat and tidy. I just had to know what was going on, where we were in each book.

And I had to admit to myself that there was no way in heaven and on earth that I was going to carry all those details in my head without dropping them. It HAD to be noted visually somewhere, in a place where I would see it, in a format that I couldn't put down and forget about (this is why my entire life resides in Google Docs, including my lesson plans). I can't do paper, because I'm too perfectionist. Anything I do has to be in a format that I can change and still have it look perfect ("writing on air," as one does online, is perfect for somebody with my precise hangups).

It has to be in some form that I can't set down and put other things on top of – no physical notebooks (as a writer, I do not keep a physical notebooks, because I'd lose my writing notebook just as readily as I'd lose a lesson-plan book. I am the least romantic writer on earth – I don't care about nice pens, handwriting, beautiful notebooks, any of that. I care about writing, and Google Docs is the best thing ever to have happened to me).

This isn't exactly about process, but it's the why behind what I do. I think to figure out a planning process that will actually work for you, and not stress you out or make you feel imprisoned, you do have to know yourself and how you work. If something like an Erin Condren planner works for you, then great. To me that looks like a nervous breakdown in a pretty cover, but if that's your mojo, then go for it.

I think the really important principles are:

*You MUST KNOW what you're going to do every day that you do school. That is, you can change it when you get to that day, but you don't have to make it up on the spot. The school year is made up of days, even if they aren't consecutive all the time. The more you can account for each day on the front end, even if you change things on the fly you will still have a plan that you don't have to invent in the moment.

*You MUST KNOW how much you need to read each week to approach the end of the book in anything like the time you've allotted for that book (a term, a year, two years, whatever). There is no law that says you have to finish a book, and we've not finished our share of them. But you will feel better if you can finish a fair proportion of them, or at least get close to the end. You will not feel better if you can't even remember what it was you were supposed to be reading, and then some book turns up in March, and you think, "Ah . . . that book . . . "

*You must both anticipate how much time you want to spend schooling (9 months? The whole year?), and how much flex/break time you're going to want or need. I think it's better if you give yourself permission to move that time around as needed (just cross it off when you use it, so you don't spend the money twice, so to speak). I also think it's okay to count an "off/makeup" week as part of your formal year. If they're reading, even if they're making up work assigned earlier, that's still instructional time. For that matter, I have counted spring break as instructional time, because did we put our brains in jars that week? No, we did not. We just learned differently that week, that's all. (I've counted summers, too, even though I have mostly not done formal school in the summer).

Those are the main principles to keep in mind, as I see it. Again, I've shared my method and thinking, which might not be at all your method and way of thinking. But all of this was the key for us to making it work and not be chaotic and stressful.

Here is a sample plan used by me for one of my high-school students, with syllabus and weekly plan grid.  

To create what you see at that link, I first compiled a syllabus, at least based on our existing Mater Amabilis high-school plans, though I was also helping to write those plans even as I was planning and implementing my own year. What this school year represents is a giant experiment in how much can I reasonably load somebody up with and expect to get done? As I recall, it was a decent year. The thing that didn't get done at all (which might not even be represented on that plan), was German, and thank goodness for dual-enrollment, which enabled us to make up that lost time and meet our two-credit graduation requirement. Math didn't get done that well, but again, thank goodness for dual-enrollment, which we sincerely hope will be a transfer credit, though the person in question can cope with "Euclidian and Non-Euclidian Geometries," which is "Math for the Non-Math Person" at his chosen university. 

Anyway. Once I'd compiled my syllabus, I moved to the daily breakdown of subjects pictured on the first page of the linked document. Note that I listed titles for all books read in whatever term (where that's applicable, terms are numbered). 

In my big weekly grid, which I did for myself, though it's based on MA's grid-style plans, I shaded each reading as it was assigned, as I've described above. I color coded it by term – green is Term 1, for example. I did not finish a term at the same time in every subject, but I knew when I did finish a term. 

Orienteering my way through a year I had worked hard the previous summer to set up was a lot easier than getting up every week and saying, "What now?" 

Again, I was free to change ANYTHING I wanted about these plans. I could tweak. I generally took stock at every six-week point to ask myself what was working and what wasn't, what I might need to adjust, what I might need to drop, what I might need to add. Nothing was set in stone, except the fact that in the absence of any other inspiration, I had a plan to fall back on. Furthermore, that plan would move my student forward through things I genuinely wanted him to encounter, as well as things he just needed to do to make progress toward graduation. 

In high school, the stakes are a little higher that way: you have something like an end point in view, and the knowledge that for this child, this is it, at least as regards education in your house. Of course, you have to tell yourself, for your own sanity and your child's, that it is NOT necessary that said child read absolutely every work of world literature, every history book, every essay, every anything. That is what the rest of his life is for. Sometimes you have to talk yourself down with the reminder that the education you're offering should make that person WANT to keep reading and learning, not bury him so thoroughly that he never wants to see another book as long as he lives. You have four years and the reality that there's more out there to read than you can read in a lifetime – that's another reason for careful planning, actually. It's you, the parent, who are charged with making the big decisions about what to read, and it's good just to get that set down and rest in it. 

But even for younger children, thorough advance planning is – I think, anyway – the key to your sanity. Even if you school year-round, I'd urge you to take a month off at some natural break in your year and devote yourself to planning the next nine or eleven months in some detail, as I've described above. The stakes with younger children are different and in many ways not as high, but for your own peace if nothing else, you want the feeling of moving forward toward some accomplishment, which you achieve regularly enough to grant you a sense of success. That sense of success is what keeps you motivated. It lifts you over the February discouragement. With an active family of many younger children, you're that much more in need of a consistent plan to fall back on, a plan that doesn't depend on your having time or inspiration in the moment (though of course you can always tweak and change things as you go). But if the plan isn't there, consistently, day after day, and it's you having to invent school ex nihilo  all the time for multiple children who are always asking what to do, you will burn out. You just will. Unless you grant that your children are the best people to decide what they should be learning and doing day after day, all the time – and I absolutely do not grant that at all – then the education you had envisioned will not happen. 

It's not that they won't learn. They will. Children are made to learn, and they can educate themselves. Their minds are capable. What they're not prepared to do is choose things they don't think they're interested in, or push themselves to do things they don't find pleasant on the face of it. That is where they need you to be the parent. They need you to set the days up, day after day, so that they are partaking of a wide and varied feast, not the narrow one they might choose for themselves. HOW you do that is ultimately up to you, and you'll probably need to experiment, possibly over some years, to figure out what really works for you, but – I can't think of a non-severe way to say this – if you're not prepared to make that effort, then I think you're not prepared for the responsibility of being an educator, and you are not doing your children any favors by proposing to educate them. 

This is true, incidentally, even if you're using a box curriculum to save yourself having to think. News flash: you still have to think. Even if the curriculum is all written out for you, you are still the translator. You still have to figure out how what is on the page will play out day after day in your home, with your children. You still have to be an educator, and gird yourself to think and act like an educator, not like a busy mom with a lot of kids who needs things done for her. If you are a busy mom with a lot of kids who needs things done for her, there is a place where those things will get done for you. It's called school. If you don't want to send your children to school, then you have to do the things, and there is no way out of that. If you mean to educate your children, then start thinking of yourself as an educator, and do the work. 

But back to planning. Why plan? Why all that work? The answer is this: the key to any kind of peace in your home is consistent routine, and if you're schooling your children at home, that includes a consistent school routine. It doesn't have to be rigid or ironclad or tied to times of day – my routines have always been extremely fluid – but it does have to have some consistent rhythm, so that after a little acclimation period, everybody gets up in the morning knowing what to expect and what's expected of them. Remember that Charlotte Mason says that "Education is a Discipline." This is really what she's talking about. And the key to everyone's knowing what to expect and what's expected of them is that YOU know, all the time. 

You know because you've thought through it all beforehand. You know what's supposed to happen next – not because you're carrying it around in your head (good luck with that, especially if you're like me), but because you've written it down somewhere accessible to you, in a format that's comfortable for you, and all you have to do is look to see what it is (and change it if necessary). That's really what all this planning talk is about. It's about always knowing what's next, so that you don't have to invent what's next in the moment. It's about knowing what's next so that your children are acclimated to knowing what's next, and doing it without as much of a fight, because several months in, they're clear that this is not a matter of their free choice every day. It's just what happens. The sun comes up, they read the Monday books: inevitable. Not an argument. This is your goal, whether it's that they read the Monday books, or the next books in the loop, or however you like to structure things. Whatever you need to do to ensure that for the entire next school year, whatever that means for you, even given interruptions, disruptions, derailings, come what may, you all know what comes next, so that you can do it: DO THAT. 

Here again is a series of "getting started" posts, where I've laid out my process, in trying to envision the whole process with all the moving parts of a large family. 

ADDENDUM: 

For children up to and into Mater Amabilis Level 2 (Grades 4-5), depending on the child and that child's maturity and self-management, my checklists and plans have been entirely for myself. Once children were working independently, I gave them, week by week, a daily checklist based on my detailed plans. Using something like a blog or Google Docs, once I had the basic template set up (which books which days), I could easily change page numbers week to week and make other tweaks. 

For senior year for my last two, I planned the entire year as a daily list (Day 1-Day 180). I created a "draft" blog post for each week of five days, and each week, I just looked over the draft, made any changes I needed to, and hit "post." That blog is here. 

Note that this blog represents work they were doing for me in religion, literature, economics and government, and other odds and ends. They were both taking two dual-enrollment classes each semester: biology, mathematics, history, film studies, German, Russian (they didn't each take all these classes, obviously, but this is what was covered overall). I did not include any of that in my own planning. Doing that work was entirely their responsibility, and between them and their professors. My job was to make sure remaining bases were covered, and they weren't overloaded.