YMB #37 Loops, Blocks, and Other Schedule Options for Morning Time

This is your morning basket, where we help you bring truth, goodness, and beauty to your homeschool day. Hi everyone. And welcome to episode 37 of the, your morning basket podcast. I'm Pam Barnhill, your host, and I am so happy that you are joining me here today. Well, we are starting our fifth season of your morning basket.

I am super excited about this, and I hope you are too. As many of you know, I like to record my podcasts in bulk. I'm a busy homeschool mom, and I don't have time to string this podcasting thing out all year long. So even though this is the first episode of the season, I have already recorded half of this particular podcast season,

and we have episodes sitting in the wings waiting to be aired. So it's really kind of exciting. We have talked about morning time with middle schoolers. We've talked to Kendra Fletcher, who is one of the pioneers of morning time. She had written a book on circle time that I read when my oldest who's now 12 was four. So great conversation with her about what circle time looks like in her family.

That's what she called it. And then I've also already spoken with Jennifer McIntosh who was already on the podcast, but she's coming back and speaking to me this time about a mother's morning basket. So that's what we've got recorded so far. As you can tell, it is going to be a fabulous season right out of the gate. I have enjoyed these conversations.

Learn so much, been inspired so much already, and I can't wait to share them with you. But for today, our first conversation of the season is with me and the community manager here at your morning basket, Ms. Dawn, Garrett and Dawn is coming back on our intention was that the conversation was going to be about different kinds of scheduling. You could use in your morning time.

We get a lot of questions about loop scheduling and block scheduling and other kinds of scheduling you could use. But then, you know, when you get Don and I together, we just threw in a couple of bonus topics as well, that we think will be really helpful for you. It was a fun conversation. It was a nitty gritty practical conversation.

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 So I am joined today by not so much of a guest as a really good friend. I'm joined by the community manager here@pambarnhill.com and your morning basket,

Ms. Dawn, Garrett, and Don, and I are going to be having a conversation all about block scheduling and loop scheduling in your morning time. So we've actually been getting quite a few questions about, you know, what does this look like in morning time? And so we wanted to answer a few of those questions and show you how you could use block scheduling and loop scheduling to add a little bit of flexibility and peace to your morning time routine.

So Dawn, welcome to the podcast. Hi Pam. Thanks for having me again. I always like to come and talk with you. It's like having, you know, hashing it out with a friend. Yeah. So we always come up with really good ideas together so we can be dangerous in trouble. Yeah. Well, Don, let's just remind everybody,

tell everyone a little bit about your personal experience with morning time. Okay. Well, I have been doing morning time for a very long time. It has changed a lot over the years. I have three kiddos right now. They are 12, 11 and 10. And when my oldest was three, we kind of started morning time. I had some friends who did morning time,

and I observed what she was doing. Her kids were a little older at first. She has some the same age as mine, but she has some older ones as well. And she showed me kind of the things that they were doing and kind of taught me how they did what they called circle time. And I was reading a lot on the well-trained mind forums and I learned things called breakfast Boards.

And my mom had been a teacher for years and she taught kindergarten and she had, you know, one of those big wall calendars where you changed the dates and you had the weather and, and all that stuff. So I just kind of pulled from a bunch of different places when my oldest was three and we just kind of started. And we always had a little bit of Bible memory and prayer mixed in.

And so it's just kind of been a constant in our home for about 10 years Now. And it looks different now than what it did when you started. It does. I mean, for a long time or for a while, when we started, it was at the breakfast table, we got one of those cardboard, three tri-fold boards, you know,

like you put your science fair project on. And we had a clock and we had money and we had the counters things with the straws and just different things to put together at the breakfast table. It was very contained because with all toddlers, it has to be contained. And then as we've gotten more formal, we sit at a table and we do much,

much more of our school day during what we call, watch and McCall it at my house because it's a catch all time. It catches Shakespeare and Latin and math, a little bit of math and poetry and you name it. We probably do it during our watch my column. Okay. So I'm going to ask you about something because this is fascinating. And the reason I'm asking you is because you just mentioned it again.

But the other day, when we were chatting, you mentioned the fact that you had had some people come and observe your morning time before we were having a conversation about something totally different, but it came up that you had had some people come and observe your morning time. And just a couple minutes ago, you said, I went and watched a morning time of another mom.

So this is absolutely fascinating to me. I have never thought about maybe trying to match moms up and let him go see each other's morning times. Is that something that's done a lot in your circles? I went my friend, Heather tele, and she's pretty known in our circle, in the homeschool circles. I think she has a really neat Instagram and,

and blog and Yeah, we featured her a we for photography habit. Yeah. So she used to live here and she went to my church and she had children a little bit older than mine, and she had been homeschooled and this is a whole new cultural world for me. So I asked so, and I spent a ton of time with her because I knew nothing about kids when I had children.

Like I'd never changed a diaper, knew nothing about children. And so she kind of mentored me on that whole, how do you raise toddlers? How do you deal with babies? And so I was at her house a lot, maybe more than was necessary or even kind, but she was very gracious to me. And I just happened to see how her circle time went because we were there and spending our days together.

And it was, it was a wonderful time for me. And I've always been so very grateful to her, for her graciousness to me while I was trying to figure out how to do this thing of homeschooling and parenting and mothering and all that. So my church, we have a lot of homeschoolers and I've made friends with other homeschoolers in the community and they're like,

what do you mean you do this like this? What does this mean? And I said, well, why don't you come watch, come hang out with us for a day and see how our school day goes. And you know, some of them have been, one of my friends is taking her to be second grader out of school and is going to homeschool starting next year,

she came and watched a day. One of my friends was transitioning to a more Charlotte Mason kind of a world. And she has kids who are actually my oldest and my Margaret, my oldest child, her age and older, she has two children. And so she came and watched and saw how we kind of went through our day. Cause she wanted to try and incorporate some of the ideas and just kind of see it and experience it.

And, you know, I hand them, these are the hymns we're singing today. So you can sing along with us and this, these are the poems we're working on today. And so you can, and they just participate as if they were part of the group. And it's a really neat way to introduce someone to morning time and the ideas and just kind of,

I don't know, have that socialization everybody's worried about. Okay. I think this is the coolest thing ever. We may have to do like a whole episode on, I wish I could, like match-make mamas out there for them to go see each other's morning times, but do it yourself, like reach out. And if there's a family that's local to you,

that's doing morning time ask. I would let people come in and watch us and see all of our warts and the good things and everything else too. But I think this is absolutely fabulous for those of us. Who've been doing it a little while to open our homes and let other people come in and see. And then for those who are new, getting started just to reach out to other moms who have been doing it and say,

Hey, can I bring my kids? And we participate in your morning time. Cause I want to see what it looks like. Oh, I love that. Okay. That's not our topic, but We need each other. We need mentors. And as women allow the times we need to mentor somebody else because I find even talking with you or doing work with you,

that I have to think through the reasons why I do certain things more than I necessarily would without that kind of back and forth. And so I think this fits that area too. It's like finding your sisters. Yeah, Yeah. Which is a whole different podcast, but we can plug the skull sisters podcast look forward on iTunes. It's a good one.

Especially the ones where I'm not on there, so would stop. Okay. So I just thought that was absolutely fascinating. And so I'm going to throw that out there for you moms. Yeah. Mentor someone, let someone come in or reach out and see if you can find somebody who will let you say can't, can we participate? We want to know what this morning time thing is about.

So awesome. I love, love, love that. All right. So let's talk a little bit about loop scheduling and block scheduling, especially as it pertains to mourning time. And so I wanted to start this out by kind of giving everyone for those people who might not be familiar, give them kind of an overview of what it means to loop schedule and what it means to block schedule.

So I'm going to start there. Is that okay? Yeah. That's great. I kind of see them as very similar just based on the amount of time that you're doing your, the, your loop. If that makes sense. Yeah. It really is a muddy. Okay, well, let's kind of start at the beginning before we get too far off<inaudible> I mean,

I say that loop scheduling doesn't necessarily allow you to do, it's not a form of scheduling, so you can do less. It's a form of scheduling. So you can feel more at peace with what you're doing because you're not tying any specific subject to a specific day. So with a loop schedule, basically what you do is you set up a list of things that you're going to do in your morning time.

And then every day you sit down to do morning time, and you do it. You work on it for however long. You want to, some people may be really religious about we're going to do morning, time for 45 minutes. And other people may be, we'll like, well, today we might do two things and tomorrow we might do three things,

but basically you're working your way down this list and whatever you get to next, you do, you Mark it off. And then when you get to the end of your day, you're done, you start the next day and you just pick up where you left off on this list. And that's what loop scheduling is. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you're trying to do more or less with your schedule,

but you're never worried about what you got to on Monday. You're not saying well on Monday we have to do math and nature study. Okay. You don't worry if you don't get to both math and nature study that day, because Monday might explode and you don't even get to math. Exactly, exactly. And we're talking about morning time math at this point,

not necessarily skill math. So loop scheduling is just more about feeling at peace with your schedule. 

Whereas block scheduling, you actually can schedule to do less. And there are a couple of different things I'm talking about when I'm talking about block scheduling. One thing is putting specific things on specific days. So this is version one of block scheduling. And so basically what that means is you're going to sit down to do morning,

time. And on Monday, you're going to pray. You're going to practice your memory work, and you're going to do your morning time math and your poetry. And you might do some reading aloud with that. And that's what you do on Monday. And if you don't do morning, time on Monday, then that subject doesn't get done for the week.

And then on Tuesday, you sit down and you're going to pray and do your memory work, and you're going to do music appreciation. And you're going to read your picture books. And Wednesday might be prayer and memory work and picture study. And then your books and Thursday would be prayer and memory work and nature study would be on Thursday. And then you're going to read your books and that,

you know, so it's, you have certain things assigned to certain days. And then if for some reason you skip a day, you've got to figure out, well, where am I going to either make this subject up? Or are we just going to skip it entirely and not do it? Are we going to pick it up and do it next week?

And kind of, you know, bump that subject a week out and no way is wrong, loop scheduling or block scheduling neither way is wrong or right. It's just different ways to do it. Another variation of block scheduling is for you to do something and Misty, Winkler's big on doing this where she has a, let's say a six week term and she may not do nature study and picture study this term.

She may only be doing, you know, music appreciation and math enrichment and poetry this term. And then the next term, you might just be doing Shakespeare and picture study, and then the next term. So that's a way to block schedule to where you're not trying to do every single subject, every term you're picking and choosing which subjects you want to do this term.

And you do it more often, more than once a week or maybe for a longer amount of time. Yes. And so instead of, you know, spending 15 minutes doing something, you might do it for 30 minutes. My brother-in-law is a teacher. He teaches math in high school in Tennessee, somewhere. And their math courses like algebra is a semester long,

but he has two hours a day to teach it. So the kids may only have three classes a day because they're in those blocks instead of a year long course. So this is just a way of doing this kind of the same thing as putting it in a term, but it's going to take a little bit longer to do. Yeah. Especially if you're planning on being finished with it by the end of that term,

depending on how much you're doing. And yeah. And Dr. Perron talks about this a lot, Dr. Christopher parent from classical academic press. He saying, you know, if you can give kids fewer things to track at one time, sometimes it works out better. Whereas Charlotte, Mason is kind of the opposite in that you have a lot of things going on,

but you, you're doing little bits of a lot of different things, short lessons, right? And it could be that you loop when your kids are younger and you block when your kids are older either way. And then there's the Sarah McKinsey method, which we talked about. And I can't remember the episode number, but we'll link to it in the show notes where Sarah and I were talking about morning,

time is a way to teach from rest. And she talked about how she does one thing in her morning time and that's it. So she does a term where, you know, they're praying and they were singing some hymns, I think, and maybe they were memorizing the Nicene creed or something. And then they did one thing until they got it done.

And because she didn't like jumping around from thing to thing. And so if they were working on, you know, let's say much to do about nothing from Shakespeare, that was all they did in their morning time until they were finished with it. And then they might move on and do like a squint composer study. And they would just do that every single day until they were finished with it.

And then they would move on to something else. So all of these are very valid ways to schedule your morning time. Absolutely. I think that pretty much lays it out. We're going to link you guys to a few different things that are going to help you. We're going to link you to that Sarah McKinsey podcast, if you want to listen to that.

But also on the site, we have a couple of webinars that Sarah and I did a few gosh, almost three years ago. Now it's been, while it's been a while. Yeah. Where we talked about what is loop scheduling and what it can look like in a homeschool and then what is block scheduling and what it can look like in a homeschool.

And it's very applicable to morning time. So if you're still confused about what those are, we'll link you to those webinars and a couple of articles on the website about these things. And you can go and dig into it a little deeper. I think Sarah also has when she did the teaching from rest book club on Periscope, I think those videos are now on her site.

I think she talks about it in there too. Whether you want to include that or We can do that. And she, I think, I don't think it was teaching from rest so much as, at the same time about that same time she was doing a planning series on Periscope. And I think in one of his like her morning time planning series a video.

Yeah. But we can link to that one too, where she talks about how she's doing that. So, yeah. That's excellent. Okay. Well, do you want to dig into some of the questions? Yeah. So we have a couple of Facebook groups who have people who have purchased either our planning your year or your morning basket, the big basket.

And we said, what questions do you have? So they gave us a lot of questions. Yeah, they did. All right. And we're just going to, we're going to stick to ones about morning time for this particular podcast. I like this one when doing loop scheduling, do you give yourself a time limit? So if we're doing nature study during morning time and it like starts to get way too long,

do you stop or do you take it out of morning time? How do you manage something that seems to expand and take over your whole morning time? I would Like try to close the project and move along, but you're going to know. I mean, I think you're going to know about how long something takes you and keep in mind that like nature study and morning time is not going to be you,

you, you're not going to get up and traipse around and go on a nature walk and things like that. It's things that are specific to the table, but you know, even something like art pastels, I could see somebody sitting there with their chalk pastels and wanting to spend four ever yeah. Working on getting the picture just right, because it means they're delaying math.

Right. So I would just try to wrap it up and if it can, you know, if it consistently happened, I would know, you know, I would know that those days, the days we're going to do chalk pastels, I don't, I know that I'm not going to get to anything else in the loop that day. It's just going to be chalk pastels.

And I would probably make it a point to read aloud, you know, once they got to the point where they're just filling in the extras, I would pick up my book and start reading to them and kind of kill two birds with one stone. Yeah. Busy hands. I absolutely do that. I keep all of our things in morning time. Our morning time is our watch.

My call is very long. It's an hour and a half, which is longer than anybody ever recommends. So I'm not recommending that necessarily. We keep everything is 10 minutes or less, pretty much we might have something that's 15, but everything is very, very short. And I would never let anything kind of take over the day. So when you're looping,

I, yeah, I definitely have a kind of a, feel a time, minute limit in mind and I can just start feeling antsy. But on those days when we have handcrafts in one of our loops or drawing or something like that, I absolutely read aloud while they're working, keeping their hands busy and enjoying our current novel. That's a win. Yeah.

I like that. So kind of being aware of what you've got going on and which kids like to get stuck on it. Cause you know, you're not going to, everybody's not going to want to sit there. And so you got one kid who rushes through and then you're going to have one kid who wants to sit there forever. So yeah. So the,

the reading aloud and planning for that is a really good thing.<inaudible> okay. So, you know what else I wanted to say about your morning time Dawn? And I think this is so important. And once again, not the topic of this podcast, I think it's really important to point it out. Is that okay? You say we do this hour and a half long morning time,

but you are taking the pieces of your curriculum and putting them into the morning time. So it's not like you have this curriculum that you follow over here and then you got an extra set of all of this morning, time stuff. That's an hour and a half long and tacked it on top of your curriculum. You have taken the pieces of your curriculum and worked that into your morning time.

So your morning time is a tool for you to accomplish some of the things that you're accomplishing within your curriculum. Absolutely. And part of the reason that I can do that, I already mentioned my kids are very close in age. So part of the reason I can do that is that they do pretty much the same things just at their own level. So they're doing the same,

they're doing the same curricular year. I just expect more from the eldest and a little bit less from the youngest, but a lot of the other parts and moving pieces fit beautifully in the morning time. So that's what we do. Okay. Yeah. I just didn't want anybody over here, fainting thinking that you were doing an hour and a half on top of you?

No, no. Yeah. So yeah, very much so. Okay. All right. What's another favorite question. Pam said She uses a mixture of traditional block and loop. How does that look in her plan? Okay. So for morning time, it's actually just a loop except, okay. So what I have for morning time. Oh, and I wish I had brought it upstairs with me in my I'm using one of the forms from the big basket and at the top of that form,

it has daily subjects. And then at the bottom of the form, it has looped subjects. And so the daily subjects are, I guess, kind of BiPAP. Well, they're just the subjects we do every day. So that's kind of a termination Or maybe traditional. Yeah. That's a little More traditional. So every day we pray every day we're doing,

you know, scripture and things like that. And we're actually right now we're reading about saints. So this is something we're doing daily where we're going over catechism questions and, and things like that. But then we're looping other subjects. So today we did music appreciation and some geography. And I'm trying to think of what else we did. It was a long time ago.

It was like three hours ago. Now I think that's it. I think that's all we did other than our daily subjects. Oh. And Madlibs. They had to add Madlibs to it. So that's how we ended was with mad libs. That is the loop part, but the traditional part where the things that we do every day, and then I guess for us,

the block part would be that right now we're working through the term one, the middle ages term one morning time plans. Those are 14 weeks long. So we're going to finish those before Christmas. And then we'll probably pick up and do the advent morning time plans throughout the Christmas season. And then we'll pick back up with middle ages, term two, which not released yet,

but they will be for the spring. You could also think about that. You are doing a block of, I don't know what the nature study is and the middle ages plans, but the, the back to school backpack plans that were out in July had a block that was really focused on birds. And so you're studying birds for this term. You aren't going to study birds for forever.

You're just going to study birds for this term. And next term it'll be snails or whatever it will, Jessica will hate me for that one. It it'll be something else. Yeah. But yeah, that's exactly right. So, you know, changing topics from period to period, How do you keep track of where you are on your loop? It's really complicated.

My friend, Tina, in our groups, she says she's using book darts, which is genius. I love book darts. Have you ever seen these things? Yeah. They're like a little metal flat clip and you can put them over a page in your book is what they're for. And they're like a little arrow. So if you're copying something under your commonplace,

you can point out exactly what you want to. So if it's a library book, you don't write it, but she's using book darts on her loops to point out where she's using. I usually use the little post-it flags and I drew an arrow on one of those. And I, and I put The pilot man's book dart Is, but they fall off so easily.

And book darts don't really fall out. Yeah. So I'm kind of like jealous of her idea and might have to steal it. Well, I will tell you, I'm using the middle ages morning time plans. And so I've printed a copy of just the loop. Didn't print the whole thing. Cause that sucker's like 60 pages long and that was too much to print.

So I printed just the loop part and I stuck those pages in my planner and I use a pen and put a check Mark beside it when we're done with it. So I just go down and look for the first thing without the check Mark. And Oh my gosh. Sometimes I do the loop out of order too. Oh, I know you we've increased the loop.

W Jessica does, but okay. So today, you know, I sat down to do it and I realized that for some reason, the first book I needed for math is not here. So I've got to go check out my Amazon, you know, order and see like, did I forget to order that? Or was it just slow shipping? Cause I think I ordered that one used or whatever the case may be.

So, you know, I didn't let it stop me from progressing in morning time. I just skipped that one and moved to the next one and moved on. I will also say that before I started using already made plans, I would sit down and type up a list of what I wanted to do. So for example, one year we studied Shakespeare.

And so I sat down and said, okay, we're going to read this book. And then we're going to memorize this. And then we're going to read this biography of Shakespeare. And so I had like, you know, 20 different things that I had typed up on just an Excel spreadsheet. And when it said Shakespeare on my loop, I would actually go over to that Excel spreadsheet and see what the next thing was that I hadn't checked off that little printout and I would do the next thing.

So it's kind of like a master list of something that I'm doing for a subject. And I would use, you know, I'd just check marks. Yeah. So I have in the front of my morning time binder, I have a table of contents maybe, or just, I have a page and it has the order of what we do for our morning time.

And I actually do a number of loops within my morning time. It's got a lot of moving parts. So that's where I have the little post-it flags. But then in each book that I'm pulling off, I have a shelf. I don't have a basket of a shelf. And each book that I'm pulling off, there's some indicator of, okay, this is where we stopped.

Last time. This is where we're going to pick up. So if it's in the mathemagic book, I have a bookmark and we read that page. So now we're going to read this page and let's see here in Latin, we always do the Latin section of our day. We're reviewing our Latin for children vocabulary. So we do the current lesson that we're on and one previous lesson and we just champ through the page.

So I keep track of that and my binder. So I know where all the different moving parts are and how to kind of Mark my way through them. Okay. So it sounds like you have a great system that you've thought out in place, something really helpful to help, you know, where you're going next. All right. So Latin, now you mentioned Latin.

I think we have a question about Latin don't. We Do. One of our members asked, I'm thinking about adding Latins morning time. Is this something that I should loop or something I should block or something I should do daily? And I have opinions. Okay. I have opinions too. And I think our opinions are going to be the same. You're going with daily,

right? I am because you have to do foreign language every day. I think so too, because, well, it's not so much a skill subject like math though, I guess it is kind of, but it's the vocabulary. Yeah. And especially something with Latin where it's so dense with every nuance means something else. When you're declining a noun, every little ending means something else and the conjugating verbs and all of the different parts to Latin that we don't have in English.

I think you absolutely have to do that kind of thing every day, but I think you could choose wisely what you do during morning time for Latin. Okay. Well, let's talk about that for just a minute, but I do want to point out that this is one place where Dawn's short lessons really come in handy. So when we say Latin every day,

we're definitely not talking about 30 minutes of Latin every day. And this is not the only Latin that we do every day. Okay. So this is morning time, Latin and Dawn is saying that they do that. That's not the only Latin they're going, they're doing every day. This year. It is the only Latin we're going to be doing every day.

And I'm okay with that because we are taking the year off a formal Latin, we're continuing with Latin and morning time. And we're going to be using the resource, getting started with Latin, Which is an excellent resource. You've found all of the online stuff too. Right. I've got to Sit down this weekend and make my procedure list for that. But yes.

So in the reasoning is, is I wanted to focus on some other things this year. So I'm going to do that. But I also, I mean, I'm going to use the time that we were spending on Latin to be able to focus on those other things, but I didn't want to drop Latin entirely. I wanted them to still keep going through and doing the Latin things.

So they don't, you have to keep your hand in a little bit. You really do. You really do. Okay. So that's what we're going to be doing. And that's the only thing we're going to be doing. But you say you do some in morning time and some elsewhere. So what does that look like? So in morning time we just chat.

That's all we do. We chant one previous lesson and one current lesson, the vocabulary, it takes us five minutes. I say, Veni Vidi Vici. And they repeat and tell me what it means or the, I decline announ, happily. I have the notebook in front of me with all of the instructor, all of the words. Absolutely. I cheat here because I need that.

Or I say the four principle parts of a verb. And they tell me what the verb is. It's the, we just, we move right along. This is not dwell in space. This is you've got it. When you come across this word in your Latin later, you have to just hear it in your head because you've chanted it so many times.

Okay. So this is a review for you. This is the way you review what's going on in the other parts of, you know, other parts of your day and your Latin Creek. Right. But it also, like you're saying, you're going to do a little bit of Latin in the morning, time to keep your hand in. If we don't get to Latin later in the day,

it keeps our hand in. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. So let's talk about, so we talked about getting started with Latin. You're obviously using the chance from your curriculum, which is for children, right? Right. We are in book B. So Still going through the chance from book a that's why, when I say that we do all of them.

We go back to the very beginning of bouquet and we chat all the way through book a and to wherever we are in book B. And then we started okay. But just one Chan a day too. Okay. Our current lesson. And then it can be last week's lesson or anything before. Okay. Another good option for Latin and morning time. And I'm going to let you talk about this because you actually did it this way.

I did it differently, but so what's the other good option Song, school Latin, especially if you have young children, it's a great introduction. And all we did were the songs. We didn't even use the workbook, not at all. We played the songs and we sang songs and it was just So awesome. Yeah. And I need to, so Thomas is going to be doing my youngest.

He's going to be doing thong school this year. He's totally excited about it because he gets to watch my pet monkey. And he also it's on the DVD. They have this great little cartoon, my pet monkey. And he gets to play head venture land on the computer. And so he's like Uber excited about this, but I really should put the songs in morning time because the other two have had songs,

school Latin. Well, and then the songs do fun things. Like they say, hi, how are you? My name is they do. They do like the conversational stuff. Then they do some animals. And it's just fun. Yeah.<inaudible> Okay. But back to looping or blocking, this is kind of like the, all over the place,

you know, it's fine. You should definitely do Latin daily. That's our that's mine and Dawn's opinions. And we have them so well, you should do it daily. And getting started with Latin. If you want to do that, that's a great morning time. Only daily kind of curriculum, or it just takes, it's just going to take a few minutes and you can choose,

do just review. And I, I, I call that a loop. I loop my review of Latin because I'm going through the pages. Yeah. You are looping that that's very true. Loops can be bigger little and then they don't have to be, they don't have to be really like confused. Yeah. They can be within a subject as well as within a morning time,

which leads us to this next question that I'm seeing here, how to loop without making it too complicated. I don't know, but still covering everything you want to cover. Keep in mind what I said at the beginning, looping is not about covering more or less. Cause I think a lot of people get the idea in their head that, Oh, I'm going to loop schedule.

And that means I can do more. Not really. You could only do what you could do. It looping means that you're going to feel less stress about it because of the way your schedule is set up. If you're trying to do too much in your homeschool, looping, it is not going to solve that problem because what's going to happen is you're going to get in this loop and you're gonna find that you're going too long between doing subjects or just forever.

We're going, what should take, you know, three weeks to accomplish takes eight because you're looping it with too many other things. Right? Looping. And I think the answer to this question, she says how to loop without making it too complicated. Looping does not solve too much. It can't solve that problem. So you got to look when you sit down to make your loo,

if you have 40 things in your loop, it's still too much. Oh yes. I do agree with that part of why I keep everything really short. Oh, did I call you out? Do you have 40 things? Well, I have like four loops. Okay. So let's talk about how this works and we may need you to make us a handout on that could be the basket bonus for this episode is Don sport loops.

So do these loops have names? Yeah. Okay. I know you have beauty loop. I've heard you name that one before. So let's break this down. What are your other three loops? Okay. So if we consider the, my re Latin review is a loop, which I kind of do, I have more than four, but I have a review him loop.

So we block, we think one him for a month that opens kind of our worship time, our faith based part of our morning time. Cause I have three big blocks of morning time. And we end with a review loop where we were seeing through one him every day that we've done in the past. Then we have our discussion loop. I have some resources that I like the laying down the rails for children from simply Charlotte Mason or my book house or the Childcraft because I wanted to use them.

The Childcraft is where mathemagic is. So we just do a couple of pages in those and we talk about, and so that's a loop. So you're doing a lot of looping within a subject. So looping is not necessarily allowing you to get to more subjects. But what it's doing is allowing you to use more resources. Yes. Although like my beauty loop is multiple subjects.

We have Shakespeare, we do our that's where we do a drawing lesson. That's where we do composer study. And we just do one of those a day. So on the first day that we do what your McCall it, this week, we might do an act out of Shakespeare. And then the next day we do what you might call it. We might do a drawing lesson.

And then the next day we do it, we might skip it because we're running behind. And we had to clean up the school room at the beginning of what you might call it. And so it have composer study artists study, we sing a folk song or we do handicraft and we do one of those each day. So it's different subjects, but they're things that we want to fit into our week or into a weekend.

This is the point in the podcast where we bring up the fact that Dawn has been doing morning time now for 10 years and years. So she has this down to a science. So this should not be freaking anyone out, please don't let this freak you out because you should not be at this point until you've been doing morning time for 10 years, I had not been doing morning time for 10 years.

Dawn is way beyond. Well, and again, this has to do with the way that my family is structured. This has to do with the length of time we've been doing it. This has to do with the way we approach our curriculum. Homeschooling affords each family, the freedom that they need to accomplish the work that they feel is most important that meets the goals and vision that they have.

My goals and vision are pretty crazy. So I don't necessarily recommend this to anyone the way we do it. But I do recommend looping because I think it helps. It helps to give you peace of mind. And I love the way Pam talks about it. I just can't seem to make myself back off from what we've for so long, but You know what it works for you.

And so I think that's, what's important and you have a very specific, very special set of circumstances. You have three kids who are what, 36 months apart, 32 they're. Okay. So you know why for Dawn was really hard. Her oldest was four, but now that her oldest is 12, when it comes to homeschooling, it's pretty sweet because everybody is right there together and you have no toddlers and you don't have teams who are running off in a bunch of different directions.

You just have these little kids who are moving lockstep with each other, for the most part, I know that's not perfect, you know, not really. Yeah. But they together and it's it, it does make for a really beautiful ability to have discussions and to, to really foster that family culture in the way our family is structured. Yes. And I love your discussion loop because you're looking at something you said my book house was in there and you named a couple of other things and I'm like,

Oh, those are great resources. And how do you fit those in? And you've done it by putting them in by looping them through that one part of your morning time, which is discussion. Right. And I think that's genius. Now I am going to say, you could also do that by saying, we're going to do my book house for six weeks and then we're not going to touch it again until next year.

And then we're going to do six more weeks of my book house. So either way works either way. Absolutely works. Okay. I agree. All right. I want to talk about setting up a loop because I think some people get a little confused when setting it up. How do I know when to stop adding things and how do you know, how do I know when I have enough things in here?

And I'm going to tell you my secret for setting up a loop. So my, okay. So my secret for setting up a loop is I think in my head, if it were a perfect week, what would I get to? And that is the amount of stuff that I put in my loop. And what I mean by that is like, what is everything I would get to,

I would do music study and I would do nature study and I would do picture study and I would do a poem and I would do, you know, a piece of art and things like that. And so those are, if it were a perfect week and everything went really great, those are the things that I would get to. And so I kind of have that ideal in my head.

And I set up that loop based on that ideal with the idea that if we make it all the way through our loop in the week, that's kind of my expectation. And then I throw that expectation out the window and just follow it makes sense. Absolutely. It does. It makes a lot of sense. When I was in middle school, we had a,

B, C, D E F days. There's that six days and the days moved around. Like if we had a day off school, a Monday off, or if we had a Thanksgiving week, you might've only had three days. And so when you came back, you just did the next alphabet day, this, this make sense. And we actually set up the morning time plans in this way,

because if you look kind of, because it says, it does say week one at the top of the block schedule pages, but we didn't label those Monday through Friday, we labeled them day one through day five. So honestly you could almost loop the entire day of those block schedule plans and that would be a completely different way to do it. And so,

yeah, it makes sense to me, go ahead. So you never missed out on the day that you were, you know, whatever day it was, you were assigned. So you might've had Jim on a F a C and F days. So you never missed gym class because C day was the Thursday of Thanksgiving week. And that's how I think of loop scheduling.

You never miss out on the things that are most important to you that you really want to do because you just move to the next day. Yeah, I agree. Okay. Somebody was asking, we had another question and I'm going to try to condense it a little bit. They wanted to alternate between reading like a science, re a science text, read aloud and a different read aloud,

a different science read aloud. And they were kind of unsure how to alternate those two things. And they were worried that, Oh, no, they were alternating science and history. Yes. Oh, it's in history and their oldest is seven. Okay. I would do those by week. I would have history week and then science week and then history week and that science week.

Yeah, actually I did history week and then science week history. I did that. And that was, that was a really good schedule for us. The year we did that. Well, my kids were a little bit older. They were probably like six, seven, eight when we did that. But I did like that schedule. And you found out it,

you found that it worked well for you that there wasn't too big of a break because I would probably tend to go the other way. So the answer to this is there's no wrong answer, you know, just pick one that works for you, but I would probably tend to go the other way where we did history one day in science, the next and history,

the next and science than that. Yeah. It worked for me because I'm really good at putting off science and not doing the experiments and stuff. So it made me do the experiments because it was science week. Okay. Well, and too, now that you've said that if we're talking about not just reading, but we're talking about experiments too, it would probably be easier because you know,

when you get to the end of science week, you know, you've got to look ahead to the next science week, make out your list. And you've got the entire next week to get to the grocery store, buy whatever it is you need for your experiments. My kids didn't ever seem to have a problem with juggling like that or forgetting what they,

you know, what we'd been working on. And so, like we've said a couple of times looping can be within a subject between subjects. It can be a shorter amount of time. It can be a longer amount of it just It's managing the moving parts. Right. Last question, before we wrap this up, which one loop or block is better for short lessons,

keeping lesson short loop. I think I don't really do any blocks. Yeah. I think if you're going to block things, then you know, if you're going to block Shakespeare over six weeks, then you're going to need to cover that play in six weeks. I wouldn't recommend doing this with a little bit of kids, but you're going to need to cover that play in six weeks.

So you may need to do some longer days of Shakespeare being, if you're doing blocks where you're doing set subjects each day, kind of like how we've got it set up in the morning time plans, then I don't think it really matters. You know, I think each subject is how long it is and we specifically try to keep those short. So if you're planning your own morning time,

I think you can plan for short lessons. Even if you are doing a block schedule like that, where you're like, well, we're going to do poetry and map on Monday and composer study on Tuesday. It doesn't really matter how long the lessons are, so you can make it that way. If you want to. I think kids can handle the variety.

And I think they enjoy the variety. I mean, they like knowing lots of things. And so I guess I fall more with Charlotte Mason on this, that we're spreading that grand feast, your grand feast. Would you rather have pile of mashed potatoes in the center or do you want some mashed potatoes and some peas and some, you know, just different,

lots of different things. So that's how I imagined it. Yeah. And some days I just want to make sure everybody gets fed. So I slapped the mashed potatoes. Sure. And some days we don't get through our whole hour and a half morning time either. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. Well, I hope we have given everyone some ideas here about how this might work for you.

And I realize that a lot of what we talked about today was visual. And so do click over to the show notes for this episode and find links to some of the things that we talked about there and sent you a link to my crazy morning time. Perfect. And we're going to link you to Don's crazy morning time plan. You can go and read it and have a look at it and see what it looks like.

Well, Don, thank you so much for joining me here today. We were kind of all over the place, but I think we had a lot of good things to say. It was a lot of fun as always. And there you have it. Now, if you would like links to any of the books or resources that Don and I chatted about today,

you can find them on the show notes for this episode of the podcast that is@pambarnhill.com forward slash Y M B 37. We'll have links to everything for you. There also in the show notes are instructions on how to leave a rating or review for the your morning basket podcast in iTunes, the ratings and reviews you leave on iTunes, help us get word out about the podcast to new listeners.

So we appreciate it. When you take the to do that, you guys have an awesome couple of weeks. I'll be back again with a conversation about morning, time with middle grades in a few weeks until then keep seeking truth, goodness and beauty in your homeschool day.