How I Scheduled Year 6

This is my fifth time going through AmblesideOnline's Year 6 with a student, but the first time I've documented the Year 6 scheduling process. Year 6 is substantially different this time than it was the previous times, so I will have some decisions to make. I will mostly be scheduling Term 1 of Year 6 for this post, although if I make additions that affect the other terms I will usually go ahead and put those in so I don't forget them later. The first thing I do is download the Word format (.doc) chart from the AO website. I then open my Google Drive to the folder where I keep schedules, then choose Upload a File and load this Word document. Then I have to tell Google to save this as a Google Doc. Then I rename it to designate which school year and which child this schedule is for. Then I delete the .doc file from my Google Drive since now I have a Google Docs file instead. Next, I scan down the list of books on the left side of the chart, looking for any titles I don't plan to use. We aren't going to read the Sally Hemmings chapter in Answering the Cry, so I delete that row from the chart since that's the only chapter scheduled this term. We did all of Anatomy in Year 5, so I delete that row too. The Age of Fable schedule changed when we were at the end of Year 5, so we've already read what's assigned in Year 6 now, so I delete the Age of Fable assignments. I noticed that Geography assigns either Halliburton or Hillyer. We will read Halliburton, so I go ahead and delete the Hillyer assignments now. It's always a good idea to read the booklist footnotes while scheduling a year. I am going off to read those footnotes now. Having considered the information in the footnotes, I am ready to continue. I like to organize the readings into "units" or "sections" that each have four assignments per week. I'm going to start doing that so I can see where I have room for the books I need to add. I also use this process to see where I need to subtract or rearrange. As-is, the Bible section of the chart for Year 6 Term 1 has two weekly assignments except for a couple of weeks with three assignments (because of Trial and Triumph). So eventually, I will probably add some content to the Bible section, either by moving another book from elsewhere in the schedule or by adding a book or two. History has two assignments for the whole term and three assignments per week for half of the term. Geography only has one assignment per week, but Long's Geography isn't included in this part of the schedule. If I choose to assign those readings, a few weeks will have two geography assignments. Science has four books listed (since I removed the fifth, Anatomy) but they give us three assignments per week because The Elements and The Mystery of the Periodic Table alternate weeks. I have removed Age of Fable as I mentioned previously, so I only have one Literature book listed, The Hobbit, and that one has to go because this student has already read that book several times. Poetry happens daily, so it makes its own category. The next page of the schedule has subjects listed that don't have a specific Year 6 schedule. I am going to move these up into the other part of the schedule. Shakespeare is simple because it's literature, so I will move it up into the Literature section. I will divide this play up and put the weekly schedule into the cells in this row. (Please don't use AI for this. You can do it yourself more easily than you can check and edit what AI gives you.) I added a row under Literature and labeled it with the name of our Shakespeare play, and then I deleted the Shakespeare row from the section below. I added a row under History and labeled it with the name of our Plutarch's life that's scheduled for Term 1. Then I deleted the Plutarch row from below. All the Daily Work items will get their own row, alphabetized with the other categories, because they will themselves have four assignments per week so they don't need to fit into the other categories. I use a set of four 'O's in each cell in the row to give us a way to mark off these assignments as they are completed. Written Narration is listed as weekly work, but it will be a daily item for us. I am adding a section I'm calling Enrichment. This will get Artist/Composer, which share a row because I schedule each one every other week. I'll also include Drawing, Handicraft, and maybe Typing. It's a little flexible what goes into that category each term. We start school in July, so I will schedule the artist and composer from Term 3 of the current school year for Term 1 of this upcoming school year. I'm adding another section I'll call Written, although that label is fairly arbitrary. I'm going to put Timeline/Book of Centuries in there, along with Grammar and Dictation. Nature study can go in Geography. I'm also adding a row into which I'll put the suggested chapters from Long's Geography. I'll also add Map Drill to Geography. I don't schedule Hymn, Folk Song, or Free Reads. We sing the hymn in the morning at breakfast time, we sing the folk songs in the car, and we usually do a pretty good job of getting through most of the free reads without scheduling them. So we have cleared out all the daily and weekly work from that last page of the term schedule. I decided to schedule Huck Finn in place of The Hobbit. So I divided that book up fairly evenly across the twelve terms and put those assignments in the Hobbit row, which is now the Huck Finn row. I also moved Literature up so it's under Geography and above Science. I like to have my categories in alphabetical order. I will need more in Literature before I'm done since it has only two weekly assignments currently. I'm going to use the old schedule for The Sea Around Us, since I have the Young Readers Edition and we finished Anatomy last year. (I will add that schedule to all three terms so I don't have to come back to it later.) That gives me four weekly assignments for Science, so that category is complete. However, I don't have the book Einstein: Theory of Relativity that's on the schedule; I have Ordinary Genius, which is an alternate option that isn't listed on the chart. So I will manually change that row. (The Ordinary Genius schedule is on the Year 6 schedule page listed week by week.) Looking at Literature again, I decide to move Animal Farm from Term 2 to Term 1 and spread it over most of the term. We're going to read the full Odyssey in Terms 2 and 3 so I am happy to lighten Term 2. I still two assignments in most weeks for Bible. I'm going to add a book there that's helpful for puberty preparation. I'm also going to schedule another Christian book in that category. It's not an AO book, but it's a good one that this student should be ready for. It has 181 actual pages of text, so I'll divide that by 12 to see how many pages I am aiming for a week. I'll try to schedule chapters or portions of chapters to get us close to that amount each week. (If the weekly pages looks too high, I will spread the book over multiple terms.) I did remember at the last minute to leave two weeks free from one of the extra books to make room for the Trial and Triumph assignments. I'll look over this again to be sure things look balanced. I'll clean up formatting. But basically, this should be our schedule for AmblesideOnline Year 6 Term 1 this year. I'll work with my student to choose a poem, a Bible passage, and a Shakespeare passage to use for recitation. I'll put together a reusable checklist of daily and weekly work for the student to use. And I'll put together specific math, foreign language, and drawing assignments. I'll find the art prints. I'll make sure I have mp3s for all the folk songs. And then we should be done.