So I took a deep breath and tossed it all out the window. The next method I tried was the fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants method. I’d find something cool and we’d do it. Sometimes we wouldn’t do anything for a week. Sometimes we’d do nothing but math for a month. See where I’m going with this? I didn’t have a plan and I didn’t know our end goal, so we just floated along, making it up as we went, fingers crossed that they were learning “enough.” Sure, it was less stressful than being behind in some ways, but it was far more stressful in other ways.
I learned a lot about myself through that and I knew that if I didn’t have a complete plan in front of me from Day 1, I was never going to get to Day 180. In the middle of winter, when there is no sunlight and it’s cold and miserable, I am NOT going to feel motivated to lesson plan. I’m just not. So I knew I needed to plan the whole year out before we began… but couldn’t balance that with how to stop making myself sick with self-imposed deadlines.
And I finally figured out that the only way to truly set myself up for success was to create a loop schedule plan.
I use this method for our morning school time together, my first grader, and my seventh grader. My seventh grader is doing an extra year of Essentials because most of his class was not old enough to start Challenge and he is choosing to wait for them so they can do it together. My Challenge I student just follows the Guide so I do not need to do this for her. She’s very good at planning out her week and sticking to the plan she’s made. I am hoping that the way I plan out the year for the boys will help them reach that same level of independence.
I’m going to share my seventh grader’s loop schedule here and break down exactly how I do it and what it looks like when he sits down to work. I will share my first grader’s loop schedule in another post about the curriculum I chose for his first grade year.
I like these smaller 2 Subject Mead Five Star notebooks for making Loop Schedules. They are just the right size (6.5×9″), have plenty of pages, are high quality and don’t fall apart, and even have a pocket for storing any loose pages you may want to save. I made my tabs using planner stickers leftover from last year’s planner!
Every book needs to be planned out differently so I am including most of our plans so you can see different ways to break down a book depending on the way the book is set up.
I pick the first subject I’d like to put in the book and start breaking it down into daily lessons. In this case, I chose Science.
The science book he is using, Exploring Creation with Astronomy, is broken into chapters but not into daily lessons. So I spent some time working out how much I expected him to do in one day. I looked through the projects and decided which ones are reasonable for him to do. Then I just list it all out and he can see that it should take him six school days to complete chapter 1. And I repeated the process for each chapter of the entire book and wrote it all out in his notebook.
The flexibility in this plan is that nothing is assigned a date. He knows what to do the first day that he works on science, and the second, and the third. But sometimes life happens. For example, look at Day 11. The experiment that day requires chocolate. Well, I sprained my wrist and driving hurt so I could not run to the store and buy him chocolate that day. He could press pause on science and pick it up the next day when he had the chocolate required. But he could continue on with his other subjects because he was not “behind” by not completing science that day. He just has to go in order. It doesn’t matter if he does day 11 science on the day he is doing day 12 history.
Then I moved on to history.
For history, the instructions for each day are the same, so I wrote them at the very top. He has three tasks to complete each day. Then I broke the book up into daily assignments, just like I did with science. For history this year he is using Usborne’s Timelines of World History. We started keeping a timeline book when he was in third grade and each year he adds more to it. Eventually he will bring it with him to Challenge 1 when they start using a timeline there!
For Geography, it is again a little different than Science and History were. We are using a wonderful series of books that teach kids how to draw the world. For these books, I let him know what to do each day. There are several books, so I want him to work through each one following the instructions given and then when we works through all of them, start over at the first book and do it all again. Over and over all year. (The more prep he gets for Challenge A, the better, right?!).
Quizzing is an extracurricular he chooses to participate in but I want to encourage him to keep up with it on a consistent basis so I am requiring him to read a chapter a day of the material they are quizzing over this year. I do not include actual study time in his school assignments because what he needs to study on any given day is something he will have to decide for himself.
For Bible reading, I decided to just leave him 180 lines to fill in what he read that day. My seventh grader is reading the Kingston Bible and I can’t say enough good about it. It is completely in comic book format (and they hired professional comic artists from Marvel, etc, to do it), but it has references at the bottom of each page so you can find the story in a regular Bible. I’ve challenged him to read the whole thing this year. It is three volumes–HUGE. But he is enjoying it! Because it’s hard to determine how much he would read any given day, I thought in this case it was best to let him just tell me what he accomplished day to day.
For Latin, he has his daily lessons broken down into exactly what he needs to do for each day of the lesson on a print out that stays with his latin book. His job in the planner is simply to check off that he completed that day’s assignment. Any curriculum you use that already has a checklist ready of what to do each day can be set up in a loop schedule this way.
For math, he knows he needs to do a lesson a day and the computer records all of that for me. To track it in his planner, I decided to have him record the score he got on each lesson the first time he completed it–he has to go back and re-do the lesson until he can get 100% but I like to know where he started.
To lesson plan for spelling, I made up a plan of what he should do each day for each lesson. It won’t change from lesson to lesson, so I only wrote it all out once. We are using Spelling Zoo Level B (which, yes, he’s a bit old for but his spelling is atrocious and he wants to fix it!). At the end of the tasks for each day of the lesson, I made a spot for him to record the day he completes a lesson. In Spelling Zoo, you can’t complete a lesson until you get 100% on the spelling test TWICE. So the number of days it takes to get through a lesson is unpredictable. This is another reason a loop schedule is a great fit–you can’t assign specific Spelling Zoo lessons to an actual date. It doesn’t work that way.
We use Classical Conversations Prescripts Cursive. As you can see, he started this book last year but did not finish it. So I just went ahead and started with the first page of the incomplete portion of the book and listed the page numbers he needs to do. He can check them off as they are finished. So a loop schedule also works for books that you did not finish last year!
When CC begins for us, he will add in studying the memory work. Our community day is Monday, so I gave him things to do the rest of the week. If we go somewhere on Tuesday, he just doesn’t do Tuesday that week. Not the end of the world. I just tried to divide it up so the focus is different each day.
And the same goes for IEW and Essentials. Easy peasy. I get to decide once at the beginning of the year what my expectations are for him for the year and set him free to get these tasks done.
I always have grand plans for the books he should read every year and then I forget. So this year, I added a list of books to his Loop Schedule and BOOM, he can choose which one to read next and keep up with the list.
Hopefully these examples of how to plan out each subject for the year is helpful. The key is that while you know how much you want done for any given subject in one day, you never assign WHICH day it has to be done.
And of course, if we have a busy morning and can’t get through all the subjects, he can just pick up where he left tomorrow. If he did history, science, and math, he will save those for last the next day so that he makes sure he’s getting through day 1 of each subject before moving on to day 2.
Another side effect of this method is that he can work independently but I can keep an eye on his progress very easily. If it is day 54 of our school year and I check and see that he has checked off 54 days in Math and Science but he’s on day 11 in history or Latin, I know he hasn’t been being consistent and I can help him get back on track. (Usually by making him sit in front of me while he does Latin!).
This plan is working for us. I can pre-plan the whole year so I know where we are headed but I don’t overwhelm myself with self-imposed deadlines that make me want to cry! Win-win!