Swallows and Loop Scheduling

To remember:
The moment we realized that Able Seaman Titty (in Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome) was going to be the hero of the day by unforeseen circumstances.  Peals and shrieks of excited laughter, rolling around the couch with excitement because all had seemed lost and then... it WASN'T!  If you've read it, you know the moment I'm referring to!  If you haven't read it, you should.  That's that.

Is it really nearing the end of October again?  The girls are creating all kinds of drawings of mummies and vampires and Frankenstein's monster and leaving them scattered around the house.  Break Week finally arrived and I've been rapidly trying to plan out the next seven weeks which will take us to CHRISTMAS!! This weekend really has to see the end of the Red Riding Hood Cape I'm making for Millie since Halloween is speeding toward us so fast. 

My Auntie and her daughter sent the girls a box of goodies with blessings for Millie's healing, and I'm so thankful!  I had hours of peace today as they played with reusable stickers and imagined stories.  What a blessing to be loved so well by our dear ones.  Thank you, Jodi and Hannah.  

Here's a little chat about homeschooling and scheduling while I have a moment. 

 I indicated that I'd try to write a little about loop scheduling if I had a chance, so I'm going to give a quick rundown of what that is.  I was intimidated to mess around with a different way of scheduling because ultimately, scheduling our school traditionally (e.g., planning out what exactly we'd be doing each day of the week) technically was working for us, the girls were learning and we were working through what I wanted to accomplish each year thus far.  Only it wasn't really working, because I was always feeling behind and run down - or cracking the whip and rushing through things so we wouldn't get lost and "behind." That's not how I wanted our school days to go.  Enter loop scheduling. 

A. We have our daily subjects:  math, spelling/phonics, copywork, foreign language, Scripture and poem memorization, poetry. Those are easy to schedule per day.  But we have many books to read, and lots of beautiful rich elements to the curriculum that I felt were getting pushed aside or lost because I never had a good "schedule" for them.  For example, I longed to teach the girls piano lessons last year but it never seemed to happen because I didn't have a good way to plug it into our school day, and I didn't have a lot of non-school hours to devote to more formal teaching. 

B. This year I made a list of all the "Riches" (the beautiful, enriching parts of the curriculum).  For the riches, I just listed them on my daily plan with a check box next to each one, so we have things like Drawing, Piano lesson, Composer Study, nature study, picture study, handicrafts, etc in a list together.  Three mornings a week we spend an hour working on one of those things: whichever is next in the list to come up.  We don't skip, or move on without working on each one.  This has ensured that we are actually doing all I'm planning.  Even in a week where we only get to our riches twice, we just do the third one at the beginning of the next week and so on. 

C. As for the other subjects like history, literature, natural history, science, geography, I also made a loop but some subjects need to be included more frequently than others.  Namely, we tend to have twice as many history and literature readings in our curriculum as we do each of the other kinds of readings, so I made a list where history shows up twice, literature shows up twice and the other subjects show up once.  Then we just work through as many as we can in the daily allotted time for scheduled read alouds.  Voila!  Actually doing it this way has a) given me a sense of freedom and comfortable control instead of always feeling like I was fumbling my way through at breakneck speed and b) we are surprisingly "ahead" of where I expected us to be at this point of the year and I'm considering whether we should slow down a little here and there to make sure we're really absorbing the material, but I think we already are.   The girls are making beautiful progress in piano compared to last year when I just couldn't find a chance to squeeze things in. I am marveling at the beauty and simplicity of taking the Ambleside curriculum and just rescheduling it in a way that fits our needs. 

D. The last thing I wanted to mention is that even though math is a daily scheduled subject, I'm expanding the freedom I've experienced with loop scheduling into math.  I realized one of my girls is really struggling to remember the math addition facts for larger single digit numbers so rather than try to get through one lesson per day, we are going to take some time to just practice rote memorization of the facts, play some math games, and take the lessons more slowly. I might even set aside the curriculum and use Life of Fred again with her for awhile.  I would rather slow down and have her really know and understand the math than worry about grade level and placement which doesn't matter to me at all. She is smart and I know she can catch up, especially if we match her work to her needs. 

I hope that's encouraging to you, friends.  Let me know if you have any questions.  I ran across the conversation in the Wild + Free podcast today that was about loop scheduling so you might listen to it here or in any other podcast app you use.   The loop scheduling topic begins around 15 minutes in.   It's been encouraging to me, and I suspect I'll need to look back at this post in February when I hit the homeschool doldrums.  Isn't February the worst?  It should be October all school year!