We have tried a lot of different schedules for homeschooling and finally with this last year I think we finally have it under control. For the past half a year or so we have been using a block schedule to make our day work out.
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What is a block schedule?
A block schedule completes all of an scheduled lesson on the same day. So, you will complete a week’s worth of history in one day, instead of over the entire week. That’s pretty straight forward, right? But how do you split that up?
How we modified a block schedule to work with Illuminations*
Last year I talked with another homeschool Mom who uses block scheduling. She told me they have a few subjects they cover every day, and the rest is once a week. When she said that a light bulb went on in my head and I immediately knew that was the solution we needed. At the time I was struggling to figure out how to fit a day’s worth of work for all of our subjects into the day. We were often finishing school at 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon or later.
Our Illuminations schedule is set up for lessons to be done on certain days, it’s all quite clearly spelled out on the schedule, so instead of working down the column we work down the row.
I sat down and studied our school week and figured out which days tended to be busier, and which days were lighter on work. Tuesdays we have co-op every other week, and Thursdays we have Princess’ dance class. Those days would need to be lighter school days. One of those days I need to go grocery shopping, and there’s always some kind of errand I’ve forgotten that goes into that as well.
Knowing all of that I sat down with our classwork and worked out a general idea of what would happen when. Monday became homeschool history, it’s our most difficult subject and has the most reading to accomplish. This is our longest day. It’s best to get it done early in the week while their focus is relatively high.
Tuesday became homeschool science. CKE Biology* is relatively lighter on work because they expect you to do outside reading and activities they suggest, so that leaves us plenty of time for exploration on days we don’t have co-op and on the days we do have co-op we don’t go as deeply into the lessons.
Wednesday became homeschool geography day. Our geography studies are an odd combination of hands on geography materials AND literature studies. Our lessons being on Wednesday give me time to pre-read the books we’re using and come up with the lessons for those books.
Thursday is homeschool art and music. Mainly so far we’ve been using Alica Gratehouse’s lessons (The Art of Fall: Mixed Media Workshop for Kids, Winter Wonderland Mixed Media Workshop, Springtime Splendor: Mixed Media Workshop, and Celebrate Summer: Mixed Media Workshop) and those can be fairly time consuming, but it’s been amazing to see my kids’ interest in art expand as we try different techniques. It’s also interesting to see my kids’ opinions of art and how to complete a project become very set in stone and has led to a few personality clashes between us as I try and get them to finish the project somewhat like what she said.
Friday is still our catch-up and game day. We have lots of board games, and this allows the kids to take turns picking their favorites to play. Though I do see some favorites that come out on a regular basis (Touch of Evil, 10 Days in Europe, Kings of Israel)
But what about subjects that need to be every day for practice?
There are some classes that need to be every day for the skills practice. Math needs to be every day in the younger grades. My kids need the practice of the daily schedule to get it all done. That’s where our 20 minute homeschool schedule comes in. Twenty minutes of the daily skill, then take a break, and then back for the class of the day.
I’ll be honest some of our block schedule classes last longer than 20 minutes. This year with Mystery of History 3* our lessons are getting crazy long. Just last week (wow I started this draft a long time ago, we’re now a hundred years later in history) we read the first Martin Luther lesson and it’s almost 10 pages long. That’s a long time to sit still, so I have been known to break it up with a jumping jack break. With history I will usually alternate our daily lessons with history because Princess just is not up for two hours of straight history. She will cry. That’s a promise.
Of course last week I got complaints from my boys’ about history because, “It’s yet ANOTHER artist,” they were not sympathetic to my comment “it’s the Renaissance what did you expect?”
We also cover writing, typing, and reading every day. Reading is first thing every morning as the kids read for an hour. I just added in another 20 segment of reading for the read alone lessons from Illuminations because I LOVE their study guides. It’s the perfect amount of depth for my kids. Typing will disappear in a few months once they have mastered the skill of typing (yeah, I swear they are taking forever to learn to type, despite constant work on it), then they kids will be able to do all of their writing on the computer, but we are not there yet. YET.
Problems with block scheduling
I mentioned earlier in this post our Mondays are very busy. History is easily the meatiest subject right now. Our homeschool science is significantly easier in comparison and the kids fly through these lessons. We all needed a break with an easier year, but that means we are done with school for the day on Tuesday around 1:00, in contrast to finishing school on Monday at 3:30 or 4:00. I’m still thinking through how to make this work better, and I may ask the Mom who inspired me to start this schedule how does she deals with unequal days, because it’s getting kind of tiring.
Princess is not sold on this schedule because it means the subjects she really hates are for long periods of time, but the plus side of this is she doesn’t have to face history again for a full week.
What is awesome about block scheduling
This allows me to accommodate busy days better. I purposely scheduled our busier days (Tuesday where we have co-op twice a month, and Thursday when Princess has dance class in the middle of school time) to be easier days for school time. Now that I’m writing this I realize I did put history on the right day because Wednesday we have Kung Fu at 4:30, and I would be even more stressed if I was trying to complete history on that day as well.
I’ve been playing around with our homeschooling schedule for the past year or so. I’ve added and deleted subjects from our Illuminations* schedule as we’ve worked through what works for us and what doesn’t work. In the end we came up with a modified block schedule system.
Eventually my goal is for the kids to complete their schedule on their own, and I just check in with them from time to time during the day. Right now this set-up is designed to help them get to that independence.
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We do this type of scheduling, too. It was very interesting to read how you came anout organising your schedule. We occasionally switch over to a different method for a couple weeks just to add some variety. Right now we are doing a couple weeks of history only.
Hmmmm….. That’s an intriguing idea to try.
Yes this is kind of how we do things, but I also loop it, so we don’t have set days to do subjects on. I tried that and set days just don’t work for us, plus if we have a particularly huge lesson I can decided to split and loop back next time we do History or Science or whatever. Glad you’ve found something that works though, it does make all the difference!
Looping, that’s an interesting idea, it rather makes sense to me.
This makes sense – it would probably make the lesson more cohesive and make it stick better.
It seems to be so far.
It is very cool when you find something which works. Block scheduling doesn’t work for us, especially now the older are studying different topics from each other. I think for us the best thing is to have a routine of sorts, not attached very securely to any time and with a list of things to work through each day. If the children work well they finish early. I they mess about they finish later 🙂
I don’t know how long it’s going to work, we have a bit of a routine also, rather than a set schedule. I’m trying to get it through my kids heads if they don’t mess about they get done earlier, but they like their breaks.
W e have tried everything from teaching each subject each day to block scheduling to taking alternate weeks to study history, science, geography and world history, to just following the kids interests. I can’t say any one thing has worked perfectly and with the changing needs of the kids our approach changes each year but I definitely think there is something to be said for delving into each subject for a bit rather just skimming the surface each day.
That is one thing I love about homeschooling, the flexibility to change plans when we need to.
I’ve used a block schedule before and it works really well for us, especially with unit studies.
We do a similar schedule. I have a 2x/week type block schedule that has worked really well for a few years now.
We are actually heading the opposite way this year and shortening lessons. My kids attention spans (or lack) make it impossible to do history only 3 days a week and cover it all! I wish we could do a block schedule though. Seems so much more organized to my way of thinking!
It could be a goal to work towards 🙂 The only reason the block schedule is working at all is we break the lessons up into 20 minute segments. I’ll be curious to see how it goes this year with the longer modern history lessons.