Learning Schedules

Last night & this morning I have been working hard on our Learning Schedules for this coming school year. I've been trying to decide between doing big chunks of learning/subjects once or twice a week or doing little bits of almost every subject every day. After asking some fellow homeschool mamas, (Thank you, ladies!), and thinking on it I have decided to do a little of both. Lol! How's that for a decision? Really, what made me come to that decision was the fact that my kids all have different learning styles and are at different learning levels. Sweet Pea is starting high school and as one wise h.s. mama pointed out her studies will be more in depth. Therefore she may need to take "small bites" each day in order to be able to "digest" her studies. With the younger ones, such as Elvis who will be in 3rd grade he might get more out of studying in bigger chunks. We'll be able to do more things if we take a big bite of time for specific subjects rather than little bits every day. It may be easier too in that he might not feel as overwhelmed if he doesn't have a dozen subjects/books to work in every day.

I sat down with each child except for Bugs because he will be in Kindergarten. He won't really understand how to choose so I'll still do most of the choosing for him. I will give him other things to choose from. The older 3 helped decide how they wanted to set up their daily & weekly learning. They seemed to enjoy the one-on-one time & having a say in their days. I was proud of their wise choices. I'm hoping they will stick to this & it will help them to become more responsible.

For Elvis, (3rd grade), he decided to choose daily from his subjects.

The blue cards are subjects that must be done daily. The red cards are ones he will choose from. The green cards are co-op subjects. For now they will be included in his "get to choose" pile but that may change to being assigned every Wednesday.
I will choose about 5-6 cards from the red & green cards every day. Then I will allow Elvis to choose 3 or 4 from these. This way I am certain that he will be getting enough every week. We will also keep a log.

This is the Course of Study for this year for both Bugsy (K) & Elvis (3rd).
I wrote in pencil how many times a week each subject needs to be done. This is all subject to tweaking as needed. =)
* = Daily


This is the Course of Study for both Boo Bear & Sweet Pea.
Since they are older & I want them to take more personal responsibility I allowed them to have the choice of me assigning days to their subjects, them assigning days to their subjects, or having them choose daily/weekly as Elvis is doing. I was relieved that both chose to have them assign days. I don't mind doing it but I think it's a great 1st step to responsibility. We decided together how many times a week each subject needed to be done. Then they wrote in what days they wanted to do what.
* = Daily

I took pics of the schedules we wrote out but they are in pencil & the pics came out very light. I'll try to post them if you'd like. I'm going to type them up for myself & the kids later.

BTW, you can click on the photo if you want to see a larger image.