Delightful Things: Home Ed Schedule

Well, we are into Term 3 of this academic year. Hard to believe! Everything is going well.

People ask how I am managing with the home schooling, and a baby. Well, often it looks a lot like this:

handwriting taking place on the table, scampering taking place under the table

or like this:

Character maps for Twelfth Night, our Shakespeare play at the moment. Baby eating colouring pens (and would love to eat the poster too, if she was allowed near it...)

But seriously, it's fine. For one thing, home education is not like school-at-home, it's a totally different, a more organic and natural way of learning/educating/teaching. Children aren't at their desks from 9am - 3pm.

Also the Charlotte Mason principals short lessons work well with a baby. Better to have a shorter lesson with 100% of the child's attention, than a longer lesson with waning drifting attention. In practice for the boys at their age that means 20minutes max per lesson, and sometimes much less (Italian can be 5minutes for example, but 5 minutes or so done every day quickly builds up, and I because I have all their attention, they remember better).

Plus babies have naps, and that gives you time to work through subjects.

I have refined our schedule over the course of the year and introduced 'loops'. As we have so many activities I found it was easier to work on a loop, rather than a rigid schedule Mondays-we-always-do-XYZ, because if we always have a busy Monday out of the house, we might always miss either X,Y, or Z every week.

So our academic schedule is:

DAILY CORE:

every day:
Catechesis
Maths
Handwriting
Reading

Italian

Poetry
Literature - Read Aloud
Piano practice

Then one from:

LOOP 1:

History

Geography

Science/Nature

Then one from:

LOOP 2:

Myths/Legends/Fairy Tales
Shakespeare

Nature Journal

Drawing/handicraft
Artist Study/Composer Study/folk song & hymn

We cycle through each subject on the loop. For each subject I have a book list, and we work through each book as on the list.

B7 also narrates to me from relevant subjects. R4 is still too young for narration. If he asks, I will let him, but I won't require it from him till he is 6yrs old.

We get our work mostly done in the morning before lunch, with maybe one subject spilling over to the afternoon after lunch, and then they are FREEEEE to play and skip and dance the rest of the day.

Except most days we actually have an out-of-the-house activity, so depends on the day:

Monday - FREE

Tuesdays - Swimming, Drawing class, Beavers

Wednesdays - Drama & Italian lessons with a friend
Thursdays - Botany group/Concert group (once a month) & Bible Club for R4
Friday - Outdoor group

Spring is in the air here; some days are sunny and warm and tantalizing...other days are freezing:

paddling, trying to catch minnows

Splashing in the pond...till I told them to get out as I was afraid they might catch leptospirosis (a mother-doctor always knows how to ruin your fun)