Of Curriculum and Schedules…

Now that I’ve posted about a bajillion links to resources, I thought I’d share a bit about our schedule and how we’ve used the links in the past.

But… although I offer correlated resources here on our blog, we really don’t use much from our list of links anymore. This past year was full of setbacks and personal struggles: a too-full schedule that made completing our Essentials assignments VERY stressful, an unexpected surgery with all the unexpected doctor’s appointments and recovery time to go with it, death in the family, illnesses… life. When all this stuff happened, we fell back to using… well, books and paper, mostly.

Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it’s the Lord’s purpose that prevails.  Proverbs 19:21

I share this to get my own thoughts in order while hopefully helping others who may be trying to schedule their days for the first time (or in my case, for the more-than-first time).  Obviously, I’m still figuring things out because I modify our schedule every year.  I like to think I might be improving upon it!

For the coming school year, the main focus of our school days will be reading (click here for our reading plan), copywork (click here for an introduction to copywork/dictation/narration), and notebooking (click here for our free printable notebooking pages and setup).

Our Curriculum 2013-2014

My oldest son and I especially enjoy doing Homeschool in the Woods activities together, so that is where our history activities and projects will come from when we do them.  (The younger boys enjoy playing the review games and fiddling with the finished products!)  Our science activities will be taken from the God’s Design… and Apologia books mentioned above.

Our Schedule

Our schedule can be easily adapted for those who wish to use our lists of links or other programs/curriculum…

Links for the above schedule:

• Our Reading Plan
• We Choose Virtues Card
• Grapevine Studies: Old Testament Overview
• History Activities
• Geography Activities
• Science Activities
• Fine Arts Focus
• Notebooking

How to use our lists of links:  Simply select a subject focus for each day (as noted above in the 2-3PM time slot), go to our list of resources, and choose something to do from the list for that week.

{Okay, okay, okay.  For those who also follow on Facebook, I think I’m missing something in the above schedule.  Would you happen to know what it is?  Something about tying shoes maybe??  But, in my defense, Gary’s supposed to be the one working that into our schedule somewhere…. *sigh*  Maybe by the time they’re twenty they’ll know how to tie their shoes.  If not, I’ll delegate that task to their future wives.  At least I potty-trained them, right?}

Consider this schedule to be a general outline, as sometimes we start earlier or later, and sometimes we mix it up, and many times the activities overlap.  I’m not sure that we will choose to do everything in this particular order, either.  But we still allocate about an hour’s time for each subject.  Because the boys usually finish each of our scheduled “hours” of tasks before the end of the hour, they have a break for the remainder of the time.  (This means that our 4-year-old’s breaks are longer than our 7-year-old’s breaks, which in turn are longer than our 9-year-old’s breaks.) Sometimes we don’t do the history or science projects during the week but instead do them over the weekends.  And we also incorporate nature study into our school days.  Everything tends to go much better if we go outside every day to enjoy God’s creation!

Finally, our notebooking activities will be completed at different points throughout the day.  For more about our Classical Notebook and for free printables and instructions on how to set up a notebook, click here.