Inside: How we fit in the feast of a Charlotte Mason education and schedule all those subjects
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The feeling when leaping into a Charlotte Mason education can be simultaneously exhilarating and daunting. On the one hand, the depth and beauty of a Charlotte Mason education is so drawing and inviting. But the thought of putting it all together on our own can be overwhelming.
The feast is so rich. But how do you fit it all in? Is there truly enough time in the week? Are these other CM moms just faking it? Are they super-human? Those were some of my personal questions when dipping my toe into the CM world.
So I want to de-mystify some of the scheduling work for you and show you how to reasonably put the pieces of your weekly puzzle together.
Scheduling Your Charlotte Mason Subjects
I don’t know about your brain, but mine works better when I have something concrete to work with first. If I sit down before an empty spreadsheet on my computer, it’s inevitably going to take a long time before anything I type is of use.
Instead, I always have the urge to write things down first.
The trouble with writing down an entire weekly schedule is that it’s not easily manipulated if I need to switch things around.
Making a Schedule You Can Easily Manipulate
So instead of starting with one big sheet of paper for everything, I start with strips of construction paper (something we have an abundance of in our home). This allows me to move subjects around as I’m planning, and I can color-code based on subject type which makes rearranging at a glance easier.
1. Gather Construction Paper
The first step, of course, is gathering your construction paper. I used several different colors to make it simple for my brain to really take in the schedule when I look at it. For example, breaks are in white. Anything related to family Nature Study is in green. Bible is in purple. And each child has their own color specifically for the individual subjects they do with me, i.e. one child is light blue, one pink, one yellow, and one dark blue.
2. Cut into Roughly Correlating Sizes & Label
Once you have designated colors that make sense for you, you’ll begin cutting and labeling. When cutting, I like to start with the subjects that take the shortest amount of time. For example, poetry only takes about five minutes. I cut my 5-minute strips very thin. Then I know that my 10-minute subjects with need to be twice the size, my 15-minute subjects three times the size, and so on.
As I cut, I label each strip with the name of the subject and a number in the lower corner reminding me how long we do that subject.
While cutting, think of how many times per week a certain subject will be done. It often helps to have your yearly schedule already done, that way you know how many readings you’ll need per week to accomplish what you would like to accomplish.
For example, I know based on my oldest son’s yearly schedule that we’ll need about four history readings per week to get through the material. So I’m going to cut four 20-minute strips for history. That will cover the time it takes to both read and narrate that subject.
3. Prepare Your Area
When I’ve cut all my strips, I organize them in stacks off to the side of my table. Each subject gets its own stack. But there is enough room left on my table to have 5 columns that represent each day of the week.
If you homeschool for four days per week, you’ll have 4 columns. Or if you do six days, you’ll have 6 columns.
4. Create Your Rough Draft
This is where the fun begins! I love working puzzles, and this feels like a living puzzle because it’s going to translate into our everyday lives.
I’m going to start thinking about what I want our daily and weekly flow to be like, and I’m going to place our subjects accordingly. This is only a rough draft. Things will get moved around as we go. But I want to start getting a general idea of what the week will look like.
On our schedule, I put our long nature walk on Wednesday afternoons. Last year, we did it on Fridays, and it always felt like we were just waiting for Friday to come. This year, I want it to feel more like a mid-week refreshing. Instead we’ll do Handicrafts for our Friday afternoon fun.
I also a mom who likes my children to wake up refreshed, so I try to let them wake up naturally as much as I can. Because of this, I plan our mornings so that my earliest risers are. the first to do individual lessons with me. My youngest is my early bird, so his lessons come first in the day. By the time he’s done, my third child is awake and can do her lessons with me.
The rough draft is also the time to think about meals and other breaks. After my daughter’s lesson, it’s time for breakfast. After breakfast, everyone gets ready and does morning chores before we all come back together for family lessons, beginning with Bible. So think about when your children will need breakfast, lunch, and snacks and be sure to account for those.
5. Refine Your Schedule
When you’ve used all or at least most of your subject strips, it’s time to start thinking about refining the schedule.
Have you varied their lessons? This is essential in a Charlotte Mason education. If we want them to keep the habit of attention, we need to do our part to make that easier. Doing subjects too similar next to one another fatigues the mind. So I don’t put a history lesson next to a literature lesson. Instead, I would break those up with math.
During this step, I count times between each break, making sure they line up. When I begin Aspen’s lessons in the morning, I know I have about an hour until breakfast. Have I scheduled the right amount of subjects before breakfast comes, or do I need to bump one down in the schedule?
One of my children does better with math lessons after he’s had something to eat. Have I scheduled his lesson after snack?
Do all of the days look the same? That will feel monotonous as we get into the thick of the year. That may need some rearranging.
Use this time to think this possible schedule through. Immerse yourself into what that day would look and feel like, and try to tweak things accordingly.
Take Your Schedule to A Digital Format
When I’m happy with what I’ve laid out, I take pictures of my schedule, sit down at a computer, and open that spreadsheet we talked about earlier. Now it’s much simpler to input what I want.
I use Google Sheets for this so that all of my yearly planning can be in the same Google Drive folder.
After doing the master schedule for myself, I copy and paste to make separate schedules for each child that I’ll print and put in the front of their student binders. That way, each of them knows exactly what he or she has for the day and the subjects they should work on when they aren’t with me.
What have you found to be helpful when scheduling your year? Drop tips in the comments for other homeschooling families to glean from!
Until next time,
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