Focused and Free: Crafting Homeschool Schedules for Middle and High School

Welcome to A Mother’s Thinking Love: Living Ideas, Lovingly Shared! After eight years of homeschooling, I can attest to the fact that having a schedule is essential to a peaceful, joyful homeschool. A schedule is particularly important in the middle and high school years. Charlotte Mason’s influence has left an indelible mark on my homeschool scheduling, so I will be discussing the impact of her philosophy a bit as well. Join me for: “Focused and Free: Crafting Homeschool Schedules for Middle and High School”!

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Focused and Free

In the homeschooling community, I often hear schedules and freedom pitted against one another. After all, freedom, including freedom from school schedules and calendars, is a motivator for many homeschooling families. This independence can lead to families scoffing at the very idea of a schedule or structure in their days.

In our home, however, we have found that having a schedule gives us more freedom. By setting aside focused time for our lessons each day, we have the freedom to move on with our day, with the assurance we have made forward progress in our goals. Lessons don’t follow us into the evening or the next day. They stay in their given allotment of time. We don’t burn out over lessons that drag on and on, and we eagerly await what the next day holds.

Stack of books and basket of pencils to illustrate a homeschool day

Common Scheduling Pitfall

When I first began creating our schedules, I would, for example, take a book and divide it up into a given number of lessons or readings. If I wanted us to finish a book in one term, I may divide it across ten or eleven weeks. This was usually based on page counts of the book or the number of lessons in a textbook for subjects like science or math. These schedules were easy to make! I could plan out an entire year in no time with this method. However, I quickly found that these schedules did not take into account one crucial point: time!

I did not account for how much time each reading or lesson would take. We would walk into each day with no idea of when our formal lessons would end. I did not account for the average number of words on each page of each book we would read. I did not account for math or science lessons that may be particularly difficult and, in turn, take more time. As you can imagine, these schedules often led to burnout. I would continually reimagine our schedule only for us to be frustrated in the weeks after with the same issues. This cycle repeated until I came to understand Charlotte Mason’s philosophy for scheduling lessons.

Crafting a Schedule for Focus and Freedom

As I said previously in this post, Charlotte Mason’s philosophy for scheduling has left the biggest impact on my own scheduling efforts. While I won’t do a deep-dive into her philosophy here, I will share my take-aways and inspirations derived from her work. I knew early on that Charlotte Mason advocated for short lessons. I knew this principal, but, for too long, I did not understand how she practically accomplished this. When I began to look into the specifics, I found a strategy that worked for us.

First, I determined how much time we would spend on formal lessons each day. Next, I decided how many days we would work on each subject. Then, I planned how much time we would spend on that subject each of those days. Some subjects, like copywork or recitation, may only take five or ten minutes. Other subjects, like math or history, may need thirty minutes. The total amount of time devoted to formal lessons each day acted as a guard against over-scheduling and burnout.

Our daily schedule, then, was not a list of assignments with page numbers. Our daily schedule was a list of subjects, or books, and amounts of time. Those amounts of time also included a short review of the previous lesson, any information needed for the day’s lesson, the actual reading of the new lesson, and the narration of the day’s lesson. This last part is often overlooked but is very important.

A Note on Habits: Focus and Attention

If your student is used to being allowed to drag out lessons all day, this new scheduling method may take time to introduce. Focus and attention are musts for having success with a time-based schedule. These habits also take time to develop. You may need to take small steps and ease into this new method of scheduling. Use your own discernment and wisdom as you proceed. Even if you feel as though you are “setback” in your progress through your curriculum, know that developing the habits of focus and attention are worthy and necessary endeavors.

Simply Charlotte Mason has some very helpful articles on this topic.

Attention: Core Values of Charlotte Mason

3 Ways to Work on the Habit of Attention

Planning and Implementation Tools

While crafting your own schedule can be done for free, I have a few tools that have helped me immensely in my efforts to plan and implement our schedules.

Timer – In order to ensure that we adhere to our schedules strictly, we set timers for each subject. Both teacher and student are aware of and accountable to the timer. We use a timer on my phone, the oven, or the microwave, but you can buy one as well. This is a homeschool-friendly option.

Stopwatch – We also set a separate stopwatch to keep track of the total time we have spent on formal lessons that day. If our dedicated time is three hours, then we stop at three hours! Again, I generally use my phone for this. Here is an option.

A Delectable Education (ADE) – While we don’t attempt to recreate Charlotte Mason’s timetable in our homeschool, I greatly appreciate A Delectable Education’s resources for scheduling. Their scheduling cards helped me make sense of Charlotte Mason’s philosophy for scheduling. We don’t follow the exact list of subjects or times, but I have used ADE’s scheduling cards to make my own scheduling cards.

Audiobooks- In order to long-term plan our year, we find, if available, an audiobook for the book we are reading. We use the total time for the book to help estimate when we will complete the book by reading for a given amount of time each week. While we hold this end date loosely, the information is helpful!

Audible- We listen to many books through Audible. We use Audible’s “Timer” tool to help stay on schedule. The Timer allows us to focus because we aren’t constantly worried about checking on the time we have spent reading. The book automatically turns off after the set amount of time.

Share Your Ideas!

I hope you have enjoyed: “Focused and Free: Crafting Homeschool Schedules for Middle and High School”! How do you plan your schedule for each year? Even if you don’t use Charlotte Mason’s methods, share your ideas in the comments!

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