The Best Way To Simplify Your Homeschool Schedule

What’s the best way to simply your homeschool schedule? These tried and true strategies will help you decrease overwhelm and create the homeschool schedule your family needs to thrive.

 As much as we would love to have a schedule for every single subject at exactly the same time everyday, it really isn’t practical. Life with kids brings so many things that require our schedule to be more fluid. The problem is, when our schedule needs to flex, it can be overwhelming.

Many times, people think that you basically have two options when it comes to schedules. You’re either going to have everything scheduled out, knowing exactly what time you’ll do the lesson (example: We’ll do math from nine to 9:45, and then we’ll do reading from 9:45 to 10:15) or you’ll fly by the seat of your pants with no schedule at all.

I’m here today to say there are better ways to do it.

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Rather than scheduling content, my advice is to instead schedule time.

You’re probably like, “Well, duh, what else are we gonna schedule?”  Think of this as scheduling learning time. You’re scheduling this big block of learning time that can include many different things. Instead of scheduling by the minute with little bits of content into tiny little blocks on a schedule, we instead schedule large chunks of time that are designed to be more flexible.

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Following A Loop Schedule In Your Homeschool

In order to manage that large chunk of time, we use something called a loop schedule.

Loop scheduling doesn’t assign a particular subject to a particular day. Instead, you have a list (a loop) of work that you do during a certain time period. When it is time to work, you simply move to the next subject on the list and start there. Then, the next day, you pick up where you left off.

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An Example Of A Homeschool Loop Schedule

Let’s say you want to do history, geography, nature study, and science with your kids on a regular basis. You know on any given day you have about an hour to spend working on these subjects.

Your loop is history, geography, nature study, and science.

• On Monday, you sit down for a history assignment that takes 45 minutes. You use the remaining 15 minutes to do a quick map study for geography.
• Tuesday, you move next to nature study. You read a selection from a book and then go outside and observe a tree, putting a drawing in your nature journal. This takes the full hour.
• Wednesday, your washing machine breaks, water is everywhere, and you get none of this done.
• Thursday, you can move right into a science experiment, which takes about 30 of your minutes. You then spend the remaining 30 minutes reading the next chapter in the history book.
• What will you do on Friday? Begin with geography, of course.

You’re simplifying your homeschool schedule by saying, “I am scheduling a block of time every day that we are going to do school.”

That’s it. It’s the best way to simplify your homeschool schedule.