Planning out your homeschool lessons each week can feel daunting in the beginning.There is no one size fits all when it comes to planning. Each family needs to make a choice of how much or little they want to plan out.
Today I’m sharing how I plan out our Homeschool Lessons each week. Not to say this is the correct or only way but to share as a person who isn’t naturally inclined to stay on task or be organized, that it requires effort on my part. I try to honor the homeschooling philosophy I chose ‘A Charlotte Mason Education’ by giving it my best foot forward each week we do lessons.
Here’s how I plan out each week:
At the beginning of each new Homeschool year I print out Ambleside Online’s schedule for whatever years I am doing. This is a great guide for what needs to get done each week.
This year I started using a Time Table I made to help me fit everything in our week in a more realistic way. We don’t do every subject every day so this helps me make sure each subject has time to be done each week and that I’m not always skipping over the beauty subjects to get the core lessons done. The Time Table also helps me keep lessons short.
I’ve got AO’s schedule and my own Time Table, I then use those both to fill in my planner. In the beginning this took me much longer to fill out. But now that I have a good idea of what I’m doing, I can flip through any curriculum and my pre-reading notes and plug things in fairly quickly each week. It takes me about 10-15 mins and I try to set aside time each Sunday to get that done.
I like to fill in my planner by subjects, as I add in more students I can color code work for the individual child or just write out their name if it’s not a family subject but more independent work. Currently I break down things in my planner into Morning Time, Daily Work, Weekly Work, History & Natural History, Literature, Poetry and Tales, Preschool and Toddler Time, Mother Culture and Prep.
Our Morning Time Subjects:
These are things we get done first, I have a Mother Binder and a Student Binder we use and so everything in there gets done together because it felt silly to open and close it throughout lessons.
Hymn or Folksong (alternate each day)
Bible (alternate each day between Old and New Testament)
Recitation (alternate between the 3 bible verses and the two poems)
A Beauty Subject that gets rotated each week that’s quick (Artist Study, Composer, Foreign Language, Handicrafts)
Morning Basket items
Our Core Lessons/ Daily Work are:
Math
Reading (Independant and Reading to me)
Copywork
Language Arts
Swedish Drill
Free Reads/ Read Alouds
Weekly Work/ Subjects we Loop:
History (2x Weekly)
Shakespeare
Nature Study/ Natural History (2x Weekly)
Brush Drawing/ Watercolor
Art
Poetry
Geography & Mapwork
Timeline
Tales
This is of course not the only way to plan out a week if you’re a Charlotte Mason Homeschooler or even if you use AO. The beauty in Homeschooling is that it is extremely flexible and unique to each family. I hope this has given you encouragement and ideas for your own lesson planning!
Until next time,
