A good schedule can make or break your homeschool day, but so many of us hate the thought of being on one. Today I'm going to tell you why you should consider making a schedule, and then share the process I use for building one.
Why Schedule
I am a firm believer that if you don't approach your day with a plan you will lose the day to either what is most pressing or the time will be frittered away. And I don't say that as an accusation but from experience. When I have no plan I tend to lurch from crisis to crisis constantly feeling behind, and then when I get to the end of the day I cannot see what I have accomplished. On the chance that I'm not cleaning up messes and following up on the chaos of the day, I tend to find I have wasted away time that could have been better spent. There is nothing wrong with down time in a day, or even a day, or week, where we make no plans and just relax and see what's in store. Unfortunately, educating your children requires a more proactive stance than just doomsday scrolling through life.
If we want to do a thorough job educating our children it requires forethought and planning, with a goal in mind. Even the most hands off home educators, think through what they want their children to gain, and seed or strew resources to that end in their environment. So yeah, most of us want our children to progress to a certain point in mathematics, or learn to do something particular in their writing. Perhaps we want to see them complete a specific book or explore a certain branch of science. These ideas are fantastic goals, but they are only pie in the sky goals until we figure out how to meet them.
When the kids were small I would set very general goals and mostly just see where the year took us. There is nothing at all wrong with that approach, it served us well at that time. However, as the kids have grown the fields that we want to cover have expanded, and it is challenging to get everything accomplished that we feel is worthwhile. So, what's the solution? It's a schedule.
The schedule isn't a slave driver that dictates what we are to do with our time, but a device that frees us from the anxiety of not doing enough. Scheduling allows us to take the things that are of the highest priority for us and make a set time for them. It gives us permission to do that thing and nothing else, because other things will be done at other times. It gives us peace in knowing that we are spending our time in the wisest way possible. Too often we feel like a schedule limits us or is always telling us what to do now, and it can feel awkward when we are first starting out with a new schedule, especially if it's your first time using one. But, inevitably it allows us to accomplish more and meet more of our goals in the long run, because we aren't second guessing our usage of time.
Time is a tricky construct. It is often difficult for us to determine how much is enough, how long should we do something, what's the best way to use it. At the end of a school year we might ask ourselves did we really spend enough time on this subject, did I stay too long on that historical time period. Too often when I was making general goals and seeing where the year took us, we'd get to the end of the year and there would be whole projects that we didn't get too or a subject that we ended up dropping and not pursuing the way I'd hoped. There would be gaps in their education, that I could have better negotiated. If you've been around the blog any length of time you'll know that I believe all students have gaps, so getting on a schedule hasn't eliminated gaps, but it has left fewer that I feel need addressing. It has helped me to see that at an hour a day, four days a week, for 40 weeks, I did spend plenty of time on that topic. It has also helped me to not get bogged down in a particular study and not cover as much ground as I had hoped for when setting our goals.
There are so many ways that I schedule: yearly schedules for our school year, weekly schedules for our various obligations, curriculum maps to outline what all we want to cover in a subject in a year. But today I want to discuss daily schedules, and how they help us in our homeschooling journey.
How I Schedule
The first question I ask myself is what do I want to accomplish, and I break that down into small steps. So rather than just saying school, I list out subjects that I want to cover math, history, science, Bible, reading, writing, foreign languages, driver's ed, study skills. For another example, I wouldn't just say house work, but I list out the chores that need doing on a daily or weekly basis. Next, I prioritize my list: math is more important to me than reading at this point, driver's ed is a priority for Britt this year, but not for Ruth yet. This is the most difficult and time consuming part of making a schedule. But this is why a schedule works, it makes time for the things that are priorities and lets me say no to things that don't fit with them at this time.
After completing this pre-work, it's time to actually schedule our day, by plugging in the events we valued at times that best work for us. For me, my number one priority on weekdays is our schooling, so I start there. I begin scheduling school at 9 am because that's the time where the kids feel most rested and are awake and ready to learn. Maybe yours are early risers and are ready to go at 7 am, maybe yours are most alert in the afternoon and so that's when you start your day. The important thing is to think about what time of day is most productive for your family, and for us that is 9 am. We begin with our group subjects because in our family if we split off into individual subjects it is hard to find a stopping point to all get back together for our group subjects. Someone always seems to be interrupted. I start with the most important: breakfast and Bible reading. They fix their own breakfast and eat while I do the day's reading first thing. Next, we dive straight into history. I know that with our daily reading, project and any discussion time we easily run an hour, so I block off 9:30 to 10:30. Next, we start Britt and Ruth's most difficult subject Biology, it runs them about an hour and a half to watch the video and do the work, and I am available all that time to talk concepts through and help them with their questions. Meanwhile I assign work to Rebecca and Kate that they can mostly do independently, so that they aren't squandering their time when I can't work directly with them.
I continue this process all day, plugging in both things that have set times like their Study Skills online class at 3pm on Wednesdays, and things that fit certain time slots best like lunch with Daddy at 1 pm every day. Certain chores naturally fall right after lunch or supper. Later in the day we set aside time for them to be kids as that is my second priority for them. That means everyone gets outside time together, but they also get individual tv time for watching tv or playing Nintendo. Finally, they also get a fair amount of free time to explore their own interest and do their own thing.
I like to work out our schedule in an excel spreadsheet. I assign a time slot to each row and that way I can put things in wherever they fit and then go back and look at the empty spaces and fit tasks around my set plans. It also allows me to give each family member a column so that I can see what they should be doing at any given time, rather than cramming everything for 7 people into a single block. Since, my second priority is keeping up the house, and my third priority for the kids is seeing that they contribute to chore time, I fit in chores around our set school schedule. This means, I fit certain chores each day for both them and myself, otherwise we'd never find time to really clean the bathrooms or do laundry. I rotate through different chores each day of the week, so that all the weekly cleaning gets done. That also means that there are some things that I would do more often like vacuuming daily, but don't because I have greater priorities.
The real key to creating a schedule that works for you is to determine what is most important to spend your time on and then place that on your schedule in the time slot that makes the most sense for your family. You can continue down your prioritized list and easily figure out what you do and don't have time for, in this way I also determine which things are daily task while others become weekly or twice weekly tasks. You might have one daily schedule that works for every day of the week, but at this point in our life it makes sense to have a different schedule for each day Monday through Friday since the kids have various online classes at different times during the week.
Dangers to a Schedule
As great a schedules are there are a few things that are drawbacks both to getting a working schedule and to keeping a schedule. One danger is over scheduling. I have been guilty of this on several schedules, I either under estimate the time needed to complete something or over plan what we have energy for in a single day. The solution is to allow more time than you think is needed for a task, and to allow more down time than you think is needed in a day. The next danger I have faced is not having everyone on board. The kids I can drag along by sheer force of will, but when Gary isn't on the same page our schedule falls apart into utter chaos, so get your partner on board with you. He is great now, and at least if he doesn't particularly help with the schedule, he doesn't derail it. It helps that I plan 45 minutes for lunch together and another 45 minutes for after lunch chores that way they can get stuff done while still having time with Daddy before he leaves for work.
There are also a few dangers to having a schedule. You might find yourself being inflexible. I am a type A personality, and so I sometimes run into the struggle of having the schedule control me, rather than controlling the schedule. This can be small things, like not recognizing when a mental health day is needed and going to the park with a friend midweek, because the schedule doesn't allow for it. It can also be big things like keeping your family on a schedule that just isn't working because you can't bring yourself to update it.
The key to overcoming these issues is to remember that the schedule is a tool. Yes, it tells me that this isn't the time for a park day, and if those interruptions were to happen weekly that would be a reason to say no, but if once a month a friend asks me to do something, I can bend the schedule or restructure it for a day in order to invest in relationships that matter to us. Likewise, if I have a doctors appointment one day, a mowing job another day, and another appointment a third day, it's probably not best to throw out the schedule for a fourth day to hang out with friends. When opportunities arise it's good to look at your week as a whole, and then ask yourself if you can go off schedule without it having a huge impact on your learning goals for the year. Say yes when you can.
Secondly, revise your schedule often. I redo ours about every six months or so. I work up a new school schedule every fall, I then tweak it after a few weeks to note anything that isn't working as well as hoped. Then I tweak it again after Christmas, sometimes completely rewriting it. Then at summer break, sometimes I make a new schedule and sometimes I just throw it all out except for some general guidelines during the summer. The key is to revisit things because life is always changing, and so your schedule needs to be able to change with it.
What a Schedule has done for us
I have long been frazzled never feeling like I get up early enough or go to bed late enough to get everything done that needs doing. Then I would feel resentful that I pour out all my time doing for everyone else, without doing anything that left me feeling refreshed and fullfilled. I would feel guilty about never having time to finish the kids baby books or give them the one on one time that they wanted. I was always questioning myself if I was doing enough with their schooling even though it was often taking us 9 hours or more to complete a days lessons.
Then I decided to try a schedule. Now, if they work a solid hour on math, but don't complete the lesson that's ok, I know they have devoted a reasonable amount of time toward it and we can move on to other subjects. I have time in my day when I do my Bible study time, and they know that time is when they are to be completing after supper chores. Before I made a schedule it was impossible to make sure that they each got a cuddle night with me even though I felt strongly about consistently having that one on one time together at night. I would be too exhausted and still working long past their bedtime. Now they all have at least one hour a day that they spend together playing outside, and they have free time not just school from the time they get up till the time they go to bed.
There are still things that I don't get to in the course of a week. Those baby books and our family scrapbooks haven't progressed since Christmas of 2010. There are cleaning jobs that only get occasionally done in free time on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, that I wish I could do more often and more consistently. However, everything that is really essential and important to us gets done in a week because we have a schedule.
Starting Your Own Schedule
Perhaps you now feel like trying out a schedule to see if it might yield benefits for your family. My advice would be to give yourself plenty of grace. Plan to work on out and then rework it in a week or two. Know that especially at first that you might need phone reminders to swap tasks, or that you will be slow with transitions. Give yourself permission to say no to certain things that don't fit your priorities, while occasionally saying yes to things that don't fit the schedule. You'll find a system that works with you in no time.
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