Until River was about 3 or 4, we played the CBC on our radio pretty much all day long. (The CBC is Canada’s public broadcaster, like the BBC in Britain.) I was working on a degree in Political Science at the time, and I liked to keep on top of what was happening in the world. And, quite frankly, I preferred CBC’s shows to Raffi or Sharon, Lois and Bram. I’m just not a fan of Baby Baluga, I guess.

But as River got older, I realized that the radio wasn’t appropriate anymore. OK, I didn’t so much “realize” it — more River herself told me that she hated the radio: “it’s always about someone dying or killing someone else.” Yikes. Just hand me my worst-mother-of-the-year award already.

These days I’m far more mindful of what we having playing in the background, and now the music we play intentionally reinforces the overall structure of our day.

Morning: Classical Music

For example, I still listen to the CBC in the morning, but I switch to classical when school starts. When the classical music is playing, I find that I’m less distracted and I focus on my kids better. I like that the kids are exposed to wonderful music, and both my girls have told me that they enjoy it.

My first choice for music is CBC Radio 2, which runs the program Tempo every day from 9:00 am to 1:00 pm. The host Julie Nesrallah shares interesting tidbits of information before each piece of music, and I really do enjoy both the music and her stories. In fact, there have been several times that I’ve gone to switch the station back to Radio 1 when the kids aren’t home, and I find myself standing in front of the radio, unwilling to change the station because the music is just too beautiful.

Of course, there are days when I’m not comfortable with the radio playing at all. CBC Radio 2 still has regular news updates, and if the news is particularly frightening on any one day, I switch over to Spotify. Finding a good playlist is so easy on Spotify — I just pick a composer from the classical music section and we’re treated to their greatest hits.

Afternoon: Contemporary Music

As school wraps up in the afternoon, we switch from classical to other styles of music. Often, I let CBC Radio 2 handle this transition for me with the show Shift with Tom Allen; it starts out playing classical and then gradually moves to more contemporary styles of music. By the time I hear Arcade Fire or Mumford & Sons, I know that we’re done school for the day.

When we’re doing family chores, I like to switch the music to something more energetic. Spotify has some really fun playlists — I’m a fan of the Electro Swing one in particular. My kids usually pick a Disney playlist if I give them the choice, and I’d be fine with that if only they’d let me sing along at the top of my lungs. Bathrooms are more fun to clean when you’re singing along with the Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast.

You guys, can I just tangent* for a minute and say how much I LOVE Spotify? I asked you on my Facebook page a year or two ago if it was worth paying for a subscription given that you can just use it for free (with ads). Every single person that responded told me that they loved their subscription so I signed up for a trial and never looked back. I just pay by the year now.

I love that Spotify makes different playlists for me based on what I listen to most. I love that I can find custom playlists for pretty much anything. I love that there are separate playlists for Advent and for Christmastime and for Lent and for Easter. I love that there is a playlist called Folk for Kids — Charlotte Mason homeschoolers: you’ll want to bookmark that one. I love when companies like Memoria Press use Spotify to enhance their curriculum. I love that there was a playlist called Happy 90s and that every song on it made me feel so, so happy. And so, so old.

*Tangent. It’s a verb now. As of today.

Evening: Jazz Music

I keep the fun music on right until dinnertime, and then, when I remember, I switch the music over to jazz. This Jazz – Classical Crossover playlist here is a favourite.

Bedtime: Lullabies

Until recently, bedtime was cued with music too. I set my computer to automatically play the lullaby Stay Awake every night at 7:00. You probably know the song — it’s a cover of the song from Mary Poppins by the Innocence Mission (Now This Day Is Over). Every night when I heard the song play, I would remember to get Forrest ready for bed. I’m terrible with time, especially when I’m tired. Hearing the song was such a help, and far less annoying than an alarm.

Harbour had a song too: Always from the album Blink by Plumb. It’s quite possibly the sweetest mom-to-child song ever? I don’t know, the whole album is lovely, and Harbour loved that song in particular.

Stay Awake at 7:00 and Always at 8:00. The songs actually drove my family crazy, especially when they were watching Netflix and the music started up. I didn’t care though — I liked having an audible reminder to send the kids to bed, and I think it was a peaceful way to signal bedtime. I only stopped them recently because my computer is old and grumpy and the auto-tasks slowed it down too much.

Classical to contemporary to jazz to lullabies. I don’t know that my kids even realize that the music they hear in the background is intentional, but I believe that it affects them subconsciously. It also helps give that extra bit of structure to a day without making me feel bored myself.

Find more ways to add structure to your homeschool days each day this week with my contribution to the iHomeschool Network’s 5 Day Hopscotch: Five Laid-Back Ways to Add Structure to your Homeschool Days

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Check out the rest of the iHN Hopscotch posts here…

 

Do you pick a “word of the year” each January? I tried it last year, and my word was STRUCTURE. It was a good word, I think. In fact, it was such a good word that I made it my word of the year this year too. And I fully intend to do it again next year.

Structure can imply rhythm when I’m in a hippy-dippy “our days need a flow” mood.

Structure can mean schedules for when I’m in a “get organized or I’m going to go insane” mode.

Structure can mean rules for when I’m in a “leave your muddy boots in the middle of the kitchen floor one more time and you won’t be seeing the outdoors again until June” kind of mood.

Structure incorporates the spiritual disciplines and the church calendar that I am currently fascinated by.

Structure means less brain power wasted on everyday decisions.

And, if MagnaTiles wants to throw me a little money, I’m happy to make “structure” include the awesome buildings that my kids have created with their favourite new toy. Just sayin’.

I’ve never been good at structure. To be honest, I’m not big on doing the same things over and over and over again. I’m the kind of person that can’t stand driving home the same way twice.

I didn’t realize how much my kids craved structure until I attended a Parent and Child program at the local Waldorf school with River when she was two or three. The teacher told us that kids like the security of a routine, which is why we ate the same snack each week and read the same stories each week and sang the same songs each week — always in the exact same order. I scoffed. My kid was going to hate it. It certainly wasn’t the way things were done at the city-run Mother Goose mornings or the libraries’ toddler book clubs or our church’s Sunday School program.

But little River LOVED it. She loved knowing exactly what to expect each time, and if we so much as sang out a song out of order, she was the first one to correct us. None of the kids at Parent and Child were bored at all.

I wish that I had taken that lesson and enthusiastically applied it at home, but like I said, I’m not good with repetition. I’m trying to do better, though. I can see how my kids eat it up when I add a bit of extra structure here and there. And I have to admit, the more I embrace a regular schedule or rhythm, the smoother our days become.

Structure Prevents Decision Fatigue

It makes sense, of course. Having a structure in place frees up your mind for other important tasks. Like figuring out where your three-year-old hid your seven-year-old’s Easter candy. I’m sure we’ll find it any day now.

Did you know that when Obama was president of the US, he wore pretty much the same thing every day? It was all about cutting back on the number of decisions he had to make each day. He said, “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

And yeah, my daily decision to wash either a load of towels or a pile of diapers is clearly less important than what any POTUS needs to deal with, but I’m just as susceptible to “decision fatigue” as anyone else. What will the kids wear, and what will we eat for breakfast? What will we do this morning? How much TV should the kids watch? Will we have a snack while we’re out? What should we do for breakfast? Or lunch? Or supper?

Coming up with a set of rules and routines in advance helps eliminate so much of the day-to-day decision making. It’s also strangely helpful in parenting, as my kids seem to accept what’s written on an official schedule taped to the wall more readily than what comes out of my mouth.

All this week, I’ll be posting pain-free ways to add rhythm to your home. None of these things make me want to pull my hair out, but together they give my kids a sense of structure and safety.

Monday: Add Structure to your Day with Music
Tuesday: How Meal Planning Helps Homeschooling Kids
Wednesday: Why You Should Try a Homeschool Uniform
Thursday: Using Essential Oils as Part of your Homeschooling Routine
Friday: An Easier Way to Assign Chores

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Check out the rest of the iHN Hopscotch posts here…

Update (April 29): Intersted in Wayfarers and ELTL? I’m writing a review of the year RIGHT NOW. Join my Facebook page to be notified when it’s published.

Last week my nine-year-old asked when we’d be starting school again.

“Why, are you ready now?” I asked, half-jokingly.

“Yes.” she replied, dead serious.

My first thought was: “but I haven’t even done my 2017/2018 curriculum pick post yet!”, followed immediately by: “the house is way too messy to do lessons in!” But how do you say no to a child that’s ready to learn? I knew I had to get my butt in gear, so I picked the easier of the two tasks.

Welcome to my 2017/2018 Curriculum Pick post.

Now you might be nervous because you remember that last year’s post was an insane seven pages long. This post is actually more pages — but it’s purely for ease of navigation. I promise you that I used far fewer words this year. Just the good ones.

A quick introduction: River is almost 10 and she is going into Grade 5. Harbour is 6.5 and she is starting Grade 1. Forest will be 3 soon, and mostly I’m just trying to keep him from painting the walls while I’m teaching the other two. For the purposes of this post, I’ll just call that “preschool”.

The vast majority of our curriculum is from Barefoot Ragamuffin: English Lessons Through Literature, Reading Lessons Through Literature, Handwriting Lessons Through Literature, Pathways, and Wayfarers: Ancient History. You could say I’m a fan. You can read up on why I love ELTL in my post Adding Poetry to Our Day, and you can read a more detailed introduction to Wayfarers in my Curriculum Picks of 2016/2017 post.

Jump Ahead: Our Curriculum Pick for 2017/2018

Introduction
Math: Beast Academy and RightStart
Language Arts: Barefoot Ragamuffin and Brave Writer curriculums
History: Wayfarers: Ancient History
Geography: Wayfarers: Ancient History
Science: Science in the Ancient World
Bible: Episcopal Children’s Curriculum
Foreign Languages: Speaking French with Miss Mason and François and Latin for Children
Miscellaneous: Wayfarers: Ancient History

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Do you use a homeschool curriculum that’s neatly scheduled out for you over four or five days? It’s awesome, isn’t it? I love opening up my lesson book and seeing exactly what I need to accomplish over the day. Bible, Math, Language Arts, Science, History, Art, Composer Study, Geography — even activities for my preschooler! — it’s all laid out beautifully over a two-page spread.

It’s awesome on the first day, I mean. I can’t even make it through a week without getting behind. You know how it goes — the geography novel is still on hold at the library so by Saturday I’m four chapters behind. Oh, and I blow off Friday to hit the museum with my kids, now that we have it to ourselves again. I figure I can catch up next week — except for the “Not Back to School” party with the homeschool group on Monday, and our afternoon park date on Tuesday, and on and on and on.

Within a couple weeks, my “daily plan” is spread out over a half dozen pages. I have to flip back in the lesson book to find what we’re supposed to be doing for geography, and then flip up a few pages to find the next science lesson. History is four pages back and literature is two pages up and wait — composer study? Um… we’ll catch up on Monteverdi next year.

You get the idea.

There’s no doubt that pre-planned schedules can be a blessing for an overwhelmed mom. No thinking required — just open the book and do what it says.They take away so much of the stress of homeschooling, especially for parents that are new to homeschooling, or perhaps adding in a younger kid or two (*waves*).

However.

Schedules can also be one of the most stressful parts of homeschooling. You start panicking because you’re behind. You start canceling park dates. You think about dropping the coop you just joined. You find yourself reciting the times tables out loud to your sick child in your most loving, soothing voice just so you can tick math off the day’s list. Well, you do. I stick my sick kids in front of the TV.

In the routine vs schedule section of Jot it Down, Julie Bogart mentions homeschoolers that never took any school holidays off because the mom didn’t want to fall behind. That seems crazy, right? But actually … it doesn’t. Staying on schedule is a pretty powerful motivator. And I don’t want our homeschool to be structured that way. I want to be able to run out on a whim and not worry about how it affects the schedule. I want to be able to go out for a hike when the weather is beautiful. We are homeschooling so that we can enjoy life as fully as we can, and I don’t want Week 7 Day 4’s scheduled science lesson to hold us back.

That being said, I’m not ready to toss our curriculum out completely. I like that our curriculum gives me a day-to-day structure as well as a long-term plan. It frees me from coming up with lessons on the fly, and it gives my kids a general consistency to their days. And besides, I like the lessons; I don’t want to abandon them.

Is it possible to have the best of both worlds? How do you add flexibility to a pre-scheduled homeschool curriculum? You keep the overall routine but let the detailed schedule plan go.

It’s not as confusing as it sounds, I promise. This is the simple way that I make it work.

1/ Put all the lesson readings and activities in a master list, based on subject. 

Wayfarers is our curriculum of choice again this year. I went through the lesson book page by page and created a master list of the readings and activities scheduled for each of the complex subjects.

Complex? Hmmm… that’s probably not the right word. Composite, maybe? I’m referring to subjects that have multiple readings and activities scheduled across multiple books throughout the week. You know, not something like math where we simply do the next lesson in the textbook each day — I don’t need a master list to tell me how to proceed in those subjects. I hope.

I’m thinking more of subjects like geography. In Wayfarers, geography is scheduled across all five days but the lessons themselves are varied. Each day has a chapter in a novel to read, but some days might also have a mapping exercise, or a reading about a specific country, or a reading about geography in general, or a cooking lesson or art project based on the current region of study. (To be honest, we’ve never been able to keep up. When I made my master list for each subject, I wrote out all the assignments and readings in my master list, I cut it back some. A lot. Don’t tell.)

This is part of my master list for geography — you can download the free Wayfarers sample pack to see how it looks in the original form.

2/ Look at how many times each subject is scheduled during the week.

Once I had all the individual lessons written out (and it really didn’t take that long), I went back through my lesson book and noted how many times each subject is taught during the week. This gives me an overall sense of how much I need to teach the subjects if I want to stay “on schedule”.

3/ In your planner, note how many times you want to teach a subject — but don’t worry about assigning specific days. Let that part be flexible in your week.

For the most part, I am comfortable with the Wayfarers’ scheduling. Math, Bible, and Language Arts are every day — that’s fine with me. Geography is scheduled every day too, but I cut it down to three times a week. Science is scheduled twice, but I bumped it up to 3 or 4 times because my daughter loves science.

Once I decided on the frequency of our lessons, I copied each subject into my homeschooling planner and put a number in brackets beside it. This reminds me how many times I hope to teach each subject during the week without assigning specific days.

When I’m done these steps, I put my time stickler of a lesson book away. It’s given me what I need, and I can take it from here.

4/ Throughout the week, as you teach each subject, consult your master list for the next lesson.

When it’s time to teach a subject like geography, I flip to the master list that I keep at the front of my planner and quickly look up the next 1-3 readings and activities — however much I feel like doing that day, really. I don’t worry about how many readings and activities were actually planned for the day in the Wayfarers lesson book. I only care that we do some geography.

The same goes for history. On some days, the Wayfarers schedule has us read from a spine, and other days we add in some supplemental readings. I put all the lessons onto a master list, and now when we do a history lesson, I just check my list and do the next reading or two — or I scrap it and do our own activity to complement what we’re learning. I don’t worry about staying on schedule. I just care about doing some history three or four times a week.

5/ When you’ve finished teaching the lesson, note down what you did in your planner.

I can’t stress this enough: don’t fill out your daily planner until after you’re finished teaching the lesson. It’s so satisfying to look back on the day and write down everything that you’ve accomplished — much better than looking at a lesson plan made years in advance by someone else and feeling guilty for not getting through all the readings.

Falling Behind in the Schedule

I know what you’re thinking: won’t we will fall behind? 

Yes. Yes, we will definitely fall “behind”.

Maybe for history, we’ll get so caught up in the Egyptians that we don’t make it to the Romans by the end of the year. That’s okay. My daughter will have time to learn about the Romans when we do Ancient History again in high school. Or maybe she’ll enjoy ancient history so much that she’ll be inspired to read about the Romans over the summer. Or maybe she never, ever learns about Ancient Rome, because we end up learning the history of other places instead and she still grows up to be a functional adult.

Nobody can learn all the things. Curriculum creators do their best to give children an overview or a subject, but for every country or time period they focus on, they’re ignoring something else. And guess what? As parents, we have the freedom to do the same thing.

Here’s the thing — curriculum gets created in a vacuum. It doesn’t account for actual life. The curriculum can’t know that you’ll spend two weeks deeply immersed in the culture of Brazil as you get ready for a geography fair. The curriculum can’t predict that you’ll regularly blow off Thursday lessons in favour of a museum that has the super cool artifacts described in your history readings. Those activities count every bit as much as an assigned reading! It’s okay to do your own lessons instead of the scheduled ones. That’s when homeschooling is the best!

In English Lessons Through Literature (which I love), Kathy Jo Devore says, “My homeschooling motto has long been: Use the curriculum; don’t let the curriculum use you. I recommend the motto more highly than I recommend any of the literature selections in this book.“

It’s taken me a few years, but I’m finally beginning to use my curriculum as a book of suggestions rather than a book of requirements.

Our Routine

So how do you know when to teach a subject if it’s not scheduled on a certain day? Well, our days follow more or less the same routine: I start off with a circle time with my two youngest children — we read stories, sing songs, practice our memory work, and maybe do a bit of math. After that, at 10, my nine-year-old starts her morning lessons which normally consist of Bible, math, Latin, French, Violin practice, and either English Lessons Through Literature (ELTL) or spelling and a writing activity.

ELTL is marked with a (3) on my planner, so we typically do it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning — though the lesson can be moved to another morning or skipped entirely without much consequence. If we miss a lesson one week, we just do it the next week and keep going from there. I don’t have to panic.

Only Latin kind of gets messed up if we don’t do it each day, but then again, even our Latin book offers a possible schedule for 4 days a week instead of 5, allowing us to skip a morning here and there. And if we miss two mornings in a row? Then we’ll just stretch the chapter’s lesson out for another week. What’s the worst that can happen — it takes us more than one year to finish our Latin book? And Latin gets even older in the mean time?

Our afternoons are even more flexible because we do tend to have other activities come up after lunch. None of the afternoon subjects (geography, history, science) are scheduled more than three times, and some (health, hands-on social science projects) are marked with a (0-1), making them optional from week to week. This gives me a guaranteed 1-2 afternoons of empty time to use — or more, if needed.

When Term One is finished, I’ll reevaluate how we are doing. Are there gaps that I need to close up before moving to Term Two — keeping in mind of course, that no student can learn everything about a subject so gaps are inevitable? Maybe the better question would be: am I satisfied with the pace that we’re learning at?

Am I happy with the depth of learning?

Are we spending too much time books?

Are we spending too much time digging in the sand? Or, more likely, not enough?

Do we have balance?

Of course, when Term One is finished, Christmas will begin and I’ll lose all sense of balance anyway. I wonder if I can schedule that in…

If you enjoy this post, be sure to check out my next post: How to Find Some Flexibility in a Pre-Scheduled Curriculum

Do you want to know that absolute best thing I did last year to keep myself sane while homeschooling? I scrapped the pre-scheduled lesson plans and I used a reverse lesson planner instead.

A reverse planner is a planner where you write in the lessons that you did — after the fact — instead of the lessons that you’re planning to do in advance. Every night, I looked back over my day and listed the things that we accomplished. Math, English, Latin, baking, and history? Awesome! Oooh … but what about that science lesson that I had hoped to get to? No worries … it’s not like it’s written down anywhere. I’ll just write down the beach — no, even better: nature study! Suddenly it looks like I rocked our homeschool day instead of slacked off.

It is so much better to reflect on every awesome thing that you did rather than worry about the lessons that you missed (not to mention all the subsequent days that will be a lesson off unless you catch up).

Last year, I made fancy-shmancy planner booklets for each month. They were pretty awesome, actually. I had our (ideal) daily schedule on one side and the subjects that I hoped to get to on the other — but no actual lesson plans were written in. The booklets were a lot of fun to make, but by the end of the year, I had too many other things to print off and I didn’t want to waste my ink allowance on planner pages. Instead, I just grabbed my agenda book (when I could find it) and wrote out the lessons in there. It worked. Kind of. My handwriting is really bad. Like, comically bad. I’d show you a picture, but I have no idea where the agenda book is.

This year, I decided that I’d like a proper, full-sized planner. Something customizable. Something colourful, something big. Something that I’ll be able to locate more than once a week.

You know what? There are a lot of homeschool planners to choose from.

I checked out the popular ones, the ones that show up in all the blogger round ups. I really liked the Plan Your Year kit from Pam Barnhill at www.edsnapshots.com — it comes with an interview with a 79-Page Planning Guide and audio workshops with Sarah Mackenzie and Mystie Winckler. Actually, there’s still a good chance that I’ll buy it — seriously, let me know if you see it go on sale this month.

I was also very, very tempted to buy the planner from Morningtide to Eventide. I love that daily Bible readings are included on each day, with your choice of schedule (Revised Common Lectionary, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or no scriptures at all). The planner also includes pages for church feast days, featuring beautiful hand-painted images along with readings. It really is a lovely, well-thought out planner. I decided against it though — it was out of my price range, and besides that, none of the three planner layouts was *just* what I wanted.

Next, I turned to Etsy. Have you ever thought to look for homeschool planners on Etsy? It’s certainly not suggested in many of the “10 Best Homeschool Planners Ever — EVER!!” posts that I read.

Squirrel Planner has a lovely homeschool planner for $5.50 USD — plus a whole bunch of other planners that all match beautifully. Part of me is delighted at the thought of a homeschool planner that matches my essential oil planner that matches my grocery list printable. I mean, if I used those things. I mostly just write grocery lists on the back of envelopes.

Another Etsy planner that I like is the Homeschool Planner by Bloomington Designs ($12.99 USD). The layout is simple but lovely, and it all looks very, very usable.

This one from A Living Education is beautiful — it’s created specifically for Charlotte Mason homeschoolers and it has all sorts of lovely bird prints in it. Birds belong on everything, as far as I’m concerned. Birds make everything better.

If you head over to Etsy, you’ll find a whole bunch more. Some are editable and some aren’t, so that’s something to watch for if your penmanship has deteriorated as much as mine has. Sigh. It used to be so neat.

I hemmed and hawed over planners for weeks and weeks. I couldn’t figure out which planner I wanted. Then, out of the blue, Michaels marked down their Happy Planner by 50% and offered a free cover with purchase. What would have normally cost me $90 + tax was just $26. I grabbed it without any more thought. I also bought the matching hole punch for 55% off, because who can pass that up?

Have you seen the Happy Planner? It’s kind of like a cross between a notebook and a binder. Personally, I don’t love using binders because they’re big and bulky, but given that I’m a typical homeschooling mom who changes her mind 62 times a month, I can’t commit to having a planner with permanently binding. What if we join a coop at the last minute? My planner won’t reflect that! (Please don’t let me join a coop. Stage an intervention if that happens.) The Happy Planner uses plastic discs and a custom punch that allows you to move papers around as needed but feels more like a notebook than a binder. And they’re really, really pretty.

When I took my new planner home, I had every intention of just pulling the pages out and replacing them with my own custom pages. Then I realized that each day of the planner is divided into three sections, which is kind of perfect for scheduling three kids. Or for scheduling two kids and leaving a notes area. Or for scheduling morning lessons, afternoon lessons, and evening activities. SO MANY POSSIBILITIES!

And the best part? I could gently pull the pages out, print my daily lesson guides on them, and then stick them back in. Yay!

I worked for days to get the perfect layout. After a somewhat ridiculous amount of deliberation, I went with the first block for morning subjects, the second block for afternoon subjects, and the third block for notes — notes like “Tamara, take the kids to dance lessons.” I have an amazing ability to forget those.

I had everything perfectly lined up on my computer, and then my printer just rebelled. I don’t know why! I could not get my sample pages to print out right — they’d come out off-centre, or scaled up, or upside down. I tried again and again and again. I’m sure I used up half my monthly allotment of ink. My kids watched an insane amount of TV.

But I just couldn’t nail it. Finally, nearing midnight of the second (third?) night, I settled for “close enough”. I carefully removed some pages from my planner and I carefully put them in my printer. My printer jammed on the first two, leaving me with two crumpled and torn August weeks. The next one printed out on the wrong side. I think the last one was upside down.

I sat down with an oversized bowl of ice cream and admitted to myself that printing directly onto the planner pages wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t a total loss, though — my two-year-old is practically fluent in Spanish now, thanks to all that quality time with Dora.

Also? After struggling for days to make my subject guide fit on top of the Happy Planner pages, I had a really good idea of exactly what I want in a planner.

Basically, I just want something super simple. I’d like a list of subjects that I’d like to cover in the week, and then a column for each day from Monday to Saturday — I include Saturday because it’s a nice day to do our Brave Writer-style Poetry Tea Party, our Kids Cook Real Food online classes, and work on a handicraft. Theoretically, I mean. I usually spend Saturday nagging the kids to help me clean up this disaster of a house.

So I made my dream planner happen. And it turned out great.

Beside each subject is a number in brackets — that’s how I remind myself how many days I want to do the subject. For example, math has a (5) — it’s something I’d like to cover each day. On the other hand, Geography is (3-4), which means that I’ll probably teach it on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and maybe Friday, but if I miss a day, it isn’t critical to our overall plan.

What else makes this my “perfect planner”?

• I put my list of subjects in the middle of the week, which might look weird at first, but now I don’t have to write with my hand pressed up against the bulky discs.

• I also put a graphic at the top that I can colour in. What homeschooling mom has time to colour, you’re asking? Clearly, you’ve never sat patiently through a long oral narration or a tedious page of math questions. Believe me, I have plenty of time to colour.

• I added a list of Charlotte Mason-specific subjects that would apply across a whole week, if not a month. I often skip things like composers, artists, and hymns — mostly because I’m not good at coming up with them on the fly. I’m hoping that having the different artists and habits and handicrafts written on my planner page will help me inject that missing CM dose into our days.

• I added two calendars at the bottom of the right page because a) lots of planners seem to include calendars and b) I like the splash of colour. I’m not sure that I’ll keep it though — mostly because I’ll have to go into a file and change it for every month. What could I put instead? I was thinking a space to write in my favourite moment of the week. Do you have any thoughts?

I figure I should print off a few more pages for my planner to make it truly functional. I’m thinking that I should include a reading log, a wish list, and… what else? Which part of your homeschool planner is indispensable?

In my mind, everything is 10 minutes from my house. All of our favourite libraries are a 10-minute drive. Last year’s science coop was 10 minutes away. Back when I worked, our store was a 10-minute drive from my house. Coming home was twice as fast, though, thanks to a handy one-way street — just 10 minutes. Swimming lessons over in the next city? I don’t know, 10 minutes? We can walk to the neighbourhood deli in 10 minutes. Our church is halfway to the deli — about a 10-minute a walk. Our favourite park is 10 minutes up the highway, and there is a Starbucks just 10 minutes beyond that. If we stop to get a latte on the way to the park, it’s about a 10 or 15-minute trip altogether.

I figure it takes me 10 minutes for me to pack up the kids and get in the van. If I have to pack snacks, I do it while I’m getting the kids in the van, so it bumps my time frame up to … about 10 minutes? Oh, and it takes me 10 minutes to make coffee, which I can do while I pack the snacks and find the shoes and refill the water bottles and locate the car keys and change the diaper and download the podcast and apply the sunscreen. So 10 minutes total.

Nony from the podcast A Slob Comes Clean calls this Time Passage Awareness Disorder, and I’m pretty sure I share her affliction.

Some people aren’t phased by always being late, but it really bothers me that we can’t get anywhere on time ever. I hate feeling frazzled and two steps behind everyone else. So, last summer as I planned out our homeschooling year, I decided that we would do better — and to do better, I would schedule everything. EVERYTHING. I would make a schedule and print it off and laminate it, and then we would just do whatever the schedule told us and never be frazzled again. Lamination is the key, my friends, to a new and more organized life.

I opened a blank spreadsheet … and stared at it for a good half hour. How do you even start? Rather than making life-altering scheduling decisions, I spent the next half hour breaking the day into one-hour segments. Then I changed it to half-hour increments, and then 15 minutes, and then half-hour again. I gave each child a column on each day. Okay, good. I was finally making progress.

I plugged in the activities that we were already committed to — coops, swimming lessons, dance classes, evening clubs — and I highlighted those cells in red so that they would stand out. Then, based on what was left blank, I scheduled in meal times so that we would eat at the same time every day. Meal times were highlighted in bright orange.

I decided that we should have a daily nap time/quiet time (blue), but my schedule didn’t leave much room. No problem — I bumped both breakfast and lunch up by half an hour so that I’d have a bit more time between lunch and our afternoon activities.

This left a blank chunk in the morning, which became our main homeschooling time. I picked a few main subjects for my nine-year-old to work through each morning (highlighted with dark yellow), and then I added in a Morning Time for my younger two (light yellow). I also added in a (fuschia!) daily morning activity for them as well, so that I’d never need to come up with something creative before my morning hit of caffeine. Every single activity was highlighted with bright colours so that the quickly shrinking blank spaces were obvious.

In the evenings, I scheduled in our regular game night and movie night (light blue), and then I added a few activities in that we rarely get around to doing — things like badge work for my daughter’s girls club, or online ukulele lessons. In the afternoons, I scheduled in free play time (pink) and then park time/library visit (emerald green), stopping just short of scheduling which locations we would go to each day. I even scheduled in family chore time (aqua), with a rotating list of which rooms we will clean together each day.

I stepped back to admire my work. So colourful. Every spreadsheet cell was filled in and I couldn’t be happier. If we could live our days like this, I would be delighted. Not too rushed, with time for everything that we love. I even scheduled myself a hike one afternoon a week, all by myself (well, with a toddler on my back).

The next day we put our plan into practice. I quickly discovered that I didn’t schedule in any travel time at all, not anywhere in the whole schedule. Apparently, we tele-transport to swimming lessons and then back home again, where a hot supper awaits. Oh, that too — I didn’t schedule any time to cook meals. And this is where all my work on a tedious daily schedule paid off.

My schedule clearly showed me that I do not live in reality, where lunches need to be packed and shoes need to be found and diapers always need changing at the very last minute.

What’s more, when I reviewed my colourful spreadsheet, I realized that I have almost no spare time, either. No wonder my oldest is always complaining that never have time to teach her to sew. I literally do not have time available to teach her to sew.

Suddenly I understood why I was always, always frazzled last year — because I took on way too much. Last year, I saw free afternoons as eternally open for field trips or clubs when I really should have been guarding them for naps and schooling. Last year, I kept telling my kids that we’d do all the things, and I was just as frustrated as they were when I wasn’t able to follow through on those promises.

I had to redo my schedule.

I consulted the book Teaching from Rest by Sarah Mackenzie, which offers tips for creating a schedule that lets you breathe. She first suggests that you figure out how much time you have to work with; calculate the hours of the week — 168 for everyone — and then subtract time for the non-negotiables, like sleeping and eating. What you have left over is all you’ve got to work with.

She compares it to a financial planning: you don’t look at your modest paycheque and then put new cars, exotic vacations and large mortgages in your budget, right? Yet for some reason, we often try to cram 300 hours of activity into every single week. I think I was on the right track then when I made my blank schedule with the days broken into half-hour increments.

Mackenzie goes on to say that once you’ve figured out how much time you have in your daily budget of hours, fill only 80 percent. For example, she needs 105 minutes to teach Math, Latin and Phonics each morning, so she gives it 120 minutes on the schedule.  Morning Time needs 60 minutes, so she gives it 90. 4.25 hours of schooling is allotted 4.4 hours on the schedule. Just like books need white space around the words, our lives need “white space” around the activities. Our lives need margin.

By adding margin into the schedule, a missing math book doesn’t derail the whole morning. A schedule with margin acknowledges that life happens and lets us be prepared for it.

I love the C.S. Lewis quote near the beginning of the book:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s “own.” or “real” life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life — the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one’s “real life” is a phantom of one’s own imagination.

Life is made up of all the little, unplanned events that happen in our day — once we stop viewing these events as interruptions and start recognizing them as the fabric of life itself, they won’t stress us out as much. Adding margin to our day is one of the ways that we can expect the unexpected.

I turned back to my schedule, looking for activities to cut and places to add margin — not to mention time for meal prep and travel. It was harder than I expected. How do you know what’s too important to cut? How do you know when you left in the right amount?

I remembered the advice of Nancy Kelly, a blogger and Charlotte Mason consultant. She spoke at a Charlotte Mason conference that I attended a year or two ago. When someone asked her how you know how much to cut from your schedule, she replied that you “keep cutting back until there is peace in your home.” But what if that’s a lot? She repeated that we need to keep cutting, cutting until we have peace. We can always add more activities in as time goes in — but start from that baseline of peace.

What did that mean for me? I cut out the book club and the gymnastics lessons that I had hoped to sign the girls up for. I scheduled some subjects less often, and I combined geography and history. I but back on English in the schedule, and I’ve gave my nine-year-old more books to read independently instead of working through them together.

This year is the first year where I feel like we’ve been keeping up with my expectations. Yes, I wish we were further ahead in every subject, but I know that we’ve done a lot too. The modified schedule that I made back in August has been our baseline for the year, and even as we add and cut activities as the seasons change, I have a general sense of how much we can handle.

If you feel behind all the time, I’d like to suggest that you do what I did — open a spreadsheet program and make a detailed schedule for your week. Add everything: when you sleep, when you eat, when you clean, when you cook. Add your travel time and your work time, your exercise time and your Netflix time. Does it all fit? Cut what doesn’t, and then cut more until you have margin in your day. See if it doesn’t let you breathe a little easier.

I wanted to learn French when I was in school. I mean, I really wanted to learn French.

I took French all the way through high school, all the way to Grade 13. At the time, I thought I was okay at it. I got good grades. I could read French novels and write French papers and conjugate French verbs. Sure, I could barely hold a conversation, but that was okay — I mostly needed to know grammar to pass the class.

When I went to university — a fully bilingual school — I kept trying to improve. It took me a few weeks to find the right French class, given that I was so much more proficient with written French than spoken French. However, I took my French classes happily, and I asked the French students in my residence to practice talking with me. In exchange, I helped them edit their French papers for grammar mistakes.

Instead of going back to university the next year, I headed off to Europe to explore. My French came in handy in countries like Italy, since many Italians had the same basic knowledge of French that I did and we were able to have simple conversations. My French did not come in handy in France itself, where my clumsy accent seemed to cause the Parisians actual physical pain.

My French education continued a few years after I returned home. I took French classes in the evening, and In eve landed a job where I regularly corresponded with people across Canada, including the French-speaking people in Quebec and out East. I did my best to keep all French conversations confined to email, but once a week I had to call people to let them know their accounts were overdue. You think it’s hard asking “where’s my hostel” in French? Try telling someone that their account is about to be deactivated unless they give you their credit card number, s’il vous plaît.

Teaching My Children French

I left that job when I had my first child, River. From the beginning, I assumed that she would go into a French Immersion program when she started school so that she would learn the language more easily than I did. At our local school board, kids start French Immersion in Grade One and they don’t get another chance to join the FI stream.

Grade One came; we chose to homeschool. No French Immersion.

So then what?

For the first couple years, French wasn’t really on my radar. It wasn’t until Grade Three that I started to worry about not doing more. I mean, from time to time, she took homeschooler Art/French classes at my friend’s house, but was that enough? No, I needed to do something at home, I decided.

I was so nervous though. I really didn’t want to saddle my kids with my bad French accent. I mean, it doesn’t sound horrendous to me, but many, many Francophones have assured me that it’s more pleasant to listen to a rabid goose fighting a donkey. Well, I don’t think those are the exact words that they used, but I can’t tell, given that the feedback is rarely given in English. Do geese even get rabies? I dunno, maybe in France.

Despite my doubts, I researched curriculum and found one that I was excited about. On the first day of third grade, I sat my girls down and we began. And it was like pulling teeth. Not for me — I still think it’s a good program. My kids, though, couldn’t have cared less.

“Why do we have to learn this?” they whined.

And you know what? I had no idea why. Despite the fact that I had wanted to learn French for so long, I couldn’t come up with a good reason to force my girls to learn it yet.

I know the argument that speaking French will give you more job opportunities as an adult. But in reality, there aren’t a lot of jobs in my area where French is a requirement, beyond working for the government. And in that case, my kids won’t have much of a chance competing against the hundreds of kids graduating from the French Immersion system. Seriously — the FI schools are packed here.

Of course, my children might move to a place where French is more important. But I could argue that by that logic, I should be teaching them Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and Danish too. You never know — they might end up in Denmark.

I know too that language learning is good for brain development — and so much easier when you’re young! I 100% agree — so when we geared up for SK/Grade 4, I asked the girls if they’d be interested in learning another language. Maybe Spanish? They were surprisingly enthusiastic — even Harbour! Thanks, Dora.

Teaching My Children Spanish

I went ahead and ordered the same curriculum as before, but this time in Spanish. I also signed the girls up for a free weekly Spanish night course offered through our local school board. I was happy. They were happy!

And then they weren’t.

“Why do we have to learn this?” they whined.

“Because when you’re in class, I get to go out for tea with my friends,” I responded. That didn’t impress them. After a few months, we ended up dropping the Spanish class. It interfered with another activity that River was in, and the evening was really too long and too late for my kindergartener. Our home study fell to the side too.

And then … Latin?

I wasn’t too upset about dropping Spanish though, because at about that time River and I had started Latin for Children from Classical Academic Press, and we loved it. Loved. The lessons are short, the computer games are fun, and the grammar lessons perfectly mirror the grammar we’re covering in our English classes. And it’s Latin — what’s not to love? The word nerd in me is delighted every time we pull out the DVD.

I originally bought the curriculum because River had asked if she could study the origin of words. I didn’t intend for it to be our foreign language choice — that just sort of happened by chance. Regardless, it’s been four months and we are happily plugging along, memorizing our verb endings and chanting along with our CD in the van.

Everything was going great.

And Back to French Again

And then, French.

Lisa from the Canadian Homeschooler asked for posts about French curriculums and I suddenly panicked. Like, completely out of the blue. Why am I not teaching French? I love French! Should I be teaching my kids French?

Time for a Parent/Teacher Conference.

“Relax,” I told myself. “River just started another 10-week Art/French class, so she’s getting 45 minutes of French instruction.”

“Don’t be ridiculous”, I responded. “45 minutes isn’t nearly enough.”

“But we do Latin!”

“That’s not practical in anyway.”

“Tell that to Indiana Jones.”

“You think River is going to grow up to be Indiana Jones?”

“I just don’t want to rule it out and prematurely shut any doors.”

“Then you should probably try teaching French, too.”

This led to a frantic coffee-fueled night of research on the Internet, reading up on French language instruction. I read curriculum reviews, downloaded samples, and watched videos. Then I expanded my research to include the pros and cons of French Immersion, given that Harbour will be in that crucial Grade One window next year.

In the midst of my surfing, I stumbled across this article called Why We’re Failing at French:

“The provincial exams … don’t provide any incentive to become fluent either. Although there are some plans to change this in the future, the current exam is entirely written and based on grammar, vocabulary and reading. There is no spoken or listening component. So, students can graduate with As and Bs, without ever having engaged in a real French conversation.”

That was exactly my experience!

The Accelerated Integrative Method

The article went on to talk about a new teaching method called Accelerated Integrative Method (AIM). AIM’s creator, Wendy Maxwell, says that with her program, students can be speaking fluently with as little as 30 minutes of instruction a day.

At this point, it was well past midnight, but of course I had to know more. From what I read, the program starts off by using a combination of actions and stories to teach children French, rather than using the more traditional method of memorizing lists of nouns and verb conjugations. I watched videos of the lessons in action. It was all very cool.

Of course, I’m under no illusion that I can use a program like this at home. I don’t speak French nearly as well as the teachers in the videos, and I certainly don’t have $1000 to shell out for the program. But I kept reading, because I was too tired to get ready for bed at that point.

Apparently, there are school boards here in Ontario that are eagerly trying the program out already. The Toronto Star reported that some teachers are so excited about the program that they’re paying for it out of pocket so they can start right away.

I started to wonder how I could apply the ideas behind AIM to our own language study, particularly actions and storytelling. Maybe I should start taking out French books from the library?

Charlotte Mason and the Gouin Series Method

Suddenly I remembered reading about the Gouin Series method that Charlotte Mason used in her PNEU schools. Could this new trendy French program that I read about have anything in common with a teaching method that was developed 100 years ago? Maybe the Gouin Series would give me a more cost-effective, homeschooler-friendly way to apply some of those key AIM principles. To learn more, I headed over to the Cherrydale Press website, publishers of an inexpensive curriculum that sticks closely the CM way of language instruction.

Though the two methods of teaching are different, I found it very interesting that both advocate the use of:

1) actions along with the words, and
2) narrative rather than lists of nouns and verbs.

Charlotte Mason certainly seemed to think that the Gouin Series method worked; in fact, her students were studying one to two languages a day, covering French, German, Italian, and Latin each week by Grade Seven.

OK, forget AIM. I wanted to know more about the Gouin Series.

I learned that Francois Gouin was a Latin teacher who lived in the 19th century. According to the Volume One of Speaking French with Miss Mason and François,

“He was a Frenchman who tried unsuccessfully to learn German. He took classes, then he memorized words from a dictionary, but he still couldn’t speak German. One day he asked German children to teach him how to say the steps to opening a door. He found that if he said the German sentences and acted them out, he could remember them! He was so excited that he created sets of sentences to describe everything he saw and did in German. Each set described a single activity: how to get water from the well, how to light a fire, how an acorn grows into a tree, and even how the shepherd walks by with his dogs.”

Learning lists didn’t work. Learning grammar didn’t work. It was learning phrases as part of a narrative that did the trick as he did the actions. And it makes sense, right? When a child reaches six months old, we don’t sit him down and review verb tenses. We just speak, describing our actions as we go about our day.

A Charlotte Mason-Inspired French Curriculum for Homeschoolers

I emailed Cherrydale Press immediately and asked for a sample of the French curriculum. I quickly received both a sample of the textbook and the optional mp3.

Once I had the samples, I sat down with River and I asked her to pass me a book.

“I take the book.” I said as I took it from her.

“I open the book,” I said as I opened it up to the middle.

“I close the book,” I said as I closed it again.

River looked at me like I had lost my mind. I told her to do the actions with me while I said the phrases again.

“I take the book.” We both took a book from the pile.

“I open the book.” We both opened our books to the middle.

“I close the book.” She ignored me.

“I close the book,” I repeated.

“I like this part of the book,” she replied.

Once she had the English phrases and actions down pat, we reviewed the verbs: take, open and close. Then, I had her pantomime the actions while I switched to French: prends, ouvre, ferme. No sweat. She pantomimed again while I said the French phrases in full: “Je prends le livre. J’ouvre le livre. Je ferme le livre.” Then we ended off by saying the phrases together.

And not once during that whole lesson did a single Francophone slam his breaks outside my house, bang on my front door, and insist that I stop butchering his mother tongue. Though if that happens, we can always go ahead and purchase the optional mp3 file.

We have not been at our lessons long at all, but I already feel like this is a curriculum that we can stick with, at east until the end of the year when we can reevaluate. Unlike our old French curriculum that I had a hard time fitting into our schedule, these short lessons slide easily into our day. The actions give us a bit of a break from our written work, but the lessons are so short that they don’t stop us from doing other subjects.

In the introduction of Speaking French with Miss Mason and François, Allyson Adrian recalls how her mother said that you know you’ve become fluent when you can think and dream in another language. I remember when I first dreamed in French. It was back in my first year of university. I sat up in my bed and looked over at my roommate, who was already up and studying at her desk. She laughed and asked if I was okay; I excitedly told her that my dream was all in French.

“What did you dream about?” she asked?

“I have no idea!” I responded. “It was all in French!”

Flipping through our new French curriculum has made me so excited. Gouin’s story is so similar to mine, don’t you think? He learned the lists of words and he learned all the grammar, but it wasn’t until he changed his entire approach that he could finally hold a conversation.

Maybe I need the same kind of shift in learning. Maybe my own conversation skills will improve while I teach my own kids. Maybe I’ll even start dreaming in French again.

I just hope my kids pick it quickly enough so they’ll be able to help me translate when I wake up.

Did you enjoy this post? Be sure to check out the other homeschooling curriculums that we’ve chosen.