Piney Woods Homeschool

  Transition From Elementary to Secondary The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy helpfully has the words “Don’t Panic” printed on the cover.  Panic is what many of us feel when we get to the last few years of homeschool.  Why do we panic?  I think because we look at the years left to us with our student, and we think that we have so much we want to cover and not enough time.  Also, because our student doesn’t always cooperate with our efforts, and we worry that our efforts are in vain.  And probably we wonder if the way we are approaching each subject is really the right way.  I think often when we reach these last few years of homeschool we start to think that we aren’t capable of adequately preparing our students for the world after homeschool and we need to bring in outside help. Once we enter middle school or junior high or whatever they call that space between elementary school and high school where you come from, school seems serious and deadly and...

Personalizing AmblesideOnline (Read Part I.)   How much time should school take?  That depends!  The PUS schools spread the material over six days plus Sunday afternoons, so that’s always an option.  I have never tried to use the PUS time tables as a guide.  They are time tables for classrooms, not homes, and they changed regularly.  They were based on more days per week than I want to use.  The Scheduling page on the AO website does give you a lot of information about how the PUS schools scheduled work and how much time was allotted, if that would be helpful for you. Remember that the PUS teachers didn’t find that the schedules always worked out even in their school setting.  In a 1915 issue of the magazine for teachers , you can read a note, “For many simple and obvious reasons with which I scarcely like to burden you it is quite impossible in a school to take all the lessons at the set time and for the set period.”  So please don’t feel b...

  Personalizing AmblesideOnline In the book In Memoriam, E. A. Parish remembers frustration that sometimes Charlotte Mason seemed inconsistent in her feedback to the teachers.  Parish says, "And when we asked for the precise recipe we were told to 'mix it with brains.' Every lesson needs a special giving, and the method is based upon broad principles which leave the teacher all the exercise of her own ingenuity." We also have to exercise our own ingenuity when planning.  I can’t tell you exactly how to plan your weeks and your days, but I can show you a little of what I do and why I do it that way, and I can show you some principles from Charlotte Mason. AmblesideOnline provides book lists and schedules for every year in Years 1-12, plus for the Groups Forms I, II, and III which each have three years.  The book list is on one page and the schedule is on another, for each year.  The schedule gives you assignments for one week, not for each day.  That weekly...

 This summer I will schedule Year 7 for the fifth time, although this is the first time I will be scheduling Year 7 since the big changes in 2023.  The first time I scheduled Year 7 was before the addition of most of the science, so it also was significantly different from the three Year 7s of my middle students.  We are also participating in an online discussion group this year, so I will have to adjust our schedule for some of the books in order to match the discussion group schedule.  We will be reading Plutarch with an in-person group, so I will not be adding Plutarch to our schedule at all this year. As I always do, I begin by saving a new copy of the Year 7 chart from the AO website .  I use the regular year chart rather than the "basic" or "lite" chart to begin from.  If I were lightening this year, I would still start with the regular schedule and then consult the basic schedule for ideas, but I don't expect to need to lighten this year for this stu...

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 title...

  This year is my fifth time scheduling AmblesideOnline's Year 5.  I've  previously blogged about the process I used for one of those instances. When I schedule a year, I don't start with a previous version I've created for another child.  I start with a fresh copy of the latest official schedule chart.  Both the .doc and the .odt versions of the charts, available on the  AmblesideOnline website, allow editing, so I download one of those.  I use OpenOffice on my computer, so I would download the .odt version if I planned to keep it on my computer.  However, I usually store my schedules in Google Drive, and the .doc version converts to Google Docs better than .odt does, so this time I am using the .doc version. My first step is to download the .doc chart from AmblesideOnline.  That's available on the Year 5 Schedule page . Now I log in to Google Drive and upload that chart to my Schedules folder.  When I open that file, Google converts ...