As promised in my previous post, here are the rest of the details of my planning process for scheduling AmblesideOnline Year 2. If you missed that post, you will want to go back and check it out to see the first steps before moving on to these last few! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments, and I will do my best to answer or help you find someone else who can!
How I Created Our Schedule for AmblesideOnline Year 2:
Steps 3 and 4: Decide how much time to spend (maximum) on each lesson and in what order to place each subject. I knew that no lesson at this point should go beyond the 20 minute mark. This is not usually a problem, unless we run into that aforementioned frustration over a math problem or have a longer than usual passage to read. Knowing ahead of time which books are likely to have those long chapters that need divided up, such as Parables of Nature and Understood Betsy, I can be prepared to divide up those lessons before accidentally running over-time.
•Recitation: 15-20 min.
•Spanish: 5-10 min.
•AO Reading 1: 20 min.
•Math: 20 min.
•Weekly Subject 1: 15-20 min.
•AO Reading 2: 20 min.
•Weekly Subject 2: 10 min.
•Copywork: 5-10 min.
As you can see, I tried to alternate shorter lessons with longer. Even when I have longer lessons back-to-back, I made sure that the subjects were going to be using different parts of the brain. This really seems to be working out well thus far.
Step 5: For my own sanity in planning, I also assigned specific days for specific types of books. Again, I looked at how many readings were required under each subject. I then spread those out over the week so that, for example, we would not be doing all our History and Tales one day or all Literature the next. I also assigned specific days to each of the weekly subjects, also trying to keep one longer subject paired with one of the shorter ones.
Our Finished Schedule:
I imagine that after all this, someone might want to know exactly how our schedule looks now that it is finished! Please note: This timetable is based on the AmblesideOnline curriculum, but it is not in any way a copy of the actual AmblesideOnline curriculum, which is under copyright. I simply offer this as an example of a way to create your own daily schedule for use the AO materials.
So, there you have it! Now that I have this nifty schedule all written out, I am able to quickly and easily plan each day’s work and keep track of what we are doing next throughout the morning. I also printed off a copy for my student, so he can know what to expect next, too! I hope this example and these steps help you if you are trying to figure out how to create your own daily schedule!
This post has been very helpful! Thank you! Is your Morning Time just recitation or do you include other things as well?
I am so glad it has been helpful! As to your question, things have changed some since I wrote this post, but at the time of writing, it was just a time of going over our recitations/memory work. You can check out my posts tagged #memory work to see what is usually included in this time.
Thanks for sharing! so helpful