How to Create–and Use!–a Loop Schedule

Loop scheduling has saved the day for us. Seriously, it has taken away all my mom guilt, all my frustration, and all my OCD issues with getting everything done on time. Because nothing ever got done on time and then I’d feel so discouraged and overwhelmed that it was easier to quit than keep going. Loop scheduling erases all those issues. Really, it’s like a magic cure. And it’s SO SIMPLE. I had read about the concept for a couple of years and I don’t know why I was so stubborn about piecing it all together and actually doing it. It’s working. It’s changing everything about our home school day but most importantly, it’s changing my attitude and mindset.

See back in the beginning of our home school journey, I would plan the entire year out before we began. I even typed it. I had what we were going to do every single day for all the 180 days of school we needed to complete. It was a disaster. By about two months in, I’d feel behind and rushed and overwhelmed and always trying to catch up. There is no joy in learning when there’s that much stress. Loop scheduling has fixed that for us.

What is loop scheduling? Well, you can read more about it here, but essentially, it’s just making a whole year of lesson plans for each subject and putting them in a list format. And then you don’t assign the lessons to a date. On the first day of your school year, you start at Day one of history, then day one of science, and so on. If you get through all your subjects, you stop. If you have a busy afternoon and only get through two subjects, that’s OK! You just pick up where you left off the next day. You are never behind because you just keep looping through the subjects.

Personally we use our loop schedule as part of our morning time with the items in our morning basket before the kids break off to do their independent work. But you could just as easily adjust it to your full curriculum for the day.

So, here’s how I put ours together. I used a cute little Mead 2 Subject notebook. I’m obsessed with those notebooks! They are my favorite. I just wish they came in more colors! (They are way cheaper in the physical store than online but just so you know what I mean, here’s the link!)

•  Pile up all the different curriculum you would like to add to your loop schedule. This will take some time. GO through your bookshelves, curriculum cabinets, even your Pinterest boards. Your pinterest boards are probably FILLED with art projects, games, free printables, reading lists and all kinds of other items. Search through those home school boards of yours and print anything that you may want to actually do. It may be a good idea to assess how your previous year of schooling went as part of this process so you know what your priorities are.  Organize all of this by subject or topic.
• Make a master list of all the subjects and topics you want to cover for the year. Personally, I wrote mine on the inside divider page of the two subject notebook.  Here’s mine. We only work on our loop for an hour, because it’s our morning time, not our full curriculum. Yours may be different.

  

• Work on the first subject on your list. In my case, it’s Getting Started With Latin (an excellent book, by the way). There are 134 lessons in that book so I simply wrote out 1 through 134 on a sheet of notebook paper. When we do each one, I cross it off.

  

• Move on to your next subject and write out each lesson for that. Some are as simple as Getting Started With Latin, where I can just write out the lesson numbers. Others take more time because you have to decide exactly what you want to do. For example, in history, I had to go through the Story of the World activity book and pick and choose which activities and books were going to work for my family.

  

• Repeat for each subject or topic on your list. And a topic could very well be “Fun Projects I saw on Pinterest That I’d Actually Like to Do” or a list of unit studies that sound fun, or anything else at all. This doesn’t have to just be: Math, English, History, Science. Personalize it to your family’s personality and needs. We are a Classical Conversations family, so I worked in more in-depth studies of the artists and musicians we will be learning about at CC. I also have just added a subject that’s just “Library Books” and we read something we brought home from the library, even if it’s not even remotely related to our other topics. I just have a page in my notebook where I can write down what we read.

Here are  pictures of what some of the other pages of my Loop Schedule look like:

 

Well, you get the idea. So what do you do with all this? You just start with your master list and go down it. So for me on day one, we start with Latin lesson one, and then great artists lesson one, etc. Where we leave off is where we pick up the next day. There’s no commitment to get through every subject every day. I just check off each lesson on the subject page and record where we started and where we left off each day. If we leave off at History, we pick up the next day at Drawing.  Here’s how I record what we do:

On a really busy day, maybe we only get through two or three things. On a day when everyone is really interested in history, maybe we check off three things in history before moving on. The point is to have written down everything you want to do in the year and then just take one little bite at a time without ever committing to “this is what we are doing on the 154th day of our school year” because schedules like that are doomed to fail. What if you are sick that day? What if there is an appointment or a field trip? If you make a loop schedule instead, you can just work around it. And when you finish everything on your list for a subject, you can just drop it off the loop.

 

I hope this helps you get a visual of what a loop schedule looks like and how to use it. Remember, you don’t have to make yours look anything like mine. Your curriculum choices, subjects, etc, will be what your family needs. But the concept can help keep you from feeling overwhelmed and “behind” and I think it’s an encouraging and helpful way to plan your school year. Do you use a loop schedule? How do you put yours together? Answer in the comments!