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 it. The first thing I do once it opens is change the title of the document so I know which student in what calendar year it was used. Then I go to the menu at the top and choose File > Save as Google Docs. Last, I go back to my Google Drive and delete the original upload of the .doc file so I just have the converted Google Docs file.
Then I look through the footnotes on the Booklist page for Year 5. That lets me know what I need to keep in mind as I make the schedule.
I'm ready to dig in to the schedule! I see that the first category, Bible, has two assignments each week, mostly. I want to have four assignments each week in each category, so I'm going to adjust categories and move assignments. For Bible, I can see that the New Testament reading sometimes has passages from two different gospels. If those are long enough to justify separating them, I could create a new row and move one assignment from each of those weeks to the new row. Looking over them, I do not think they are long enough to make this a good solution for this child. So I am now looking over the entire first term schedule to see what else could be included in the grouping with the Bible assignments. Trial and Triumph is a natural fit, so I move that row into the Bible section. Answering the Cry doesn't fit topically, but the two assignments this term will fit neatly in between the Trial and Triumph assignments, if I shift Answering the Cry by one week. So I add a row for Answering the Cry in the Bible section, and then I shift the Freeman assignments over to be weeks 6 and 7 so they don't overlap Trial and Triumph. That gives me three assignments most weeks and two in some weeks in the Bible section. For now, I'm going to leave that as it is.
The next section on the chart schedule is History. It has four assignments each week already, since I moved two books out of it. One of the books, the Bell/Curie biography, is not scheduled out. I have to select the bio I will use and then schedule it. Since this is my fifth time through, I already have a biography I have used and scheduled before. If I did not, I would go look on the AO forum to see what others have recommended, or I'd post there to ask for reviews. As it happens, the Year 5 schedule has had changes since I last used it, so I may need to create a new schedule for some of the science biographies. I will come back to that.
I'm going to skip over Geography for now, because I'll need to add quite a bit to that or shuffle those items into other categories.
Science already has four assignments in each week, so I'm going to move on for now.
Literature has two assignments per week to start with. The booklist also lists Plutarch and Shakespeare as literature, but on the chart those are in the separate page of daily and weekly work. Moving those to Literature would give me four assignments each week in that category. If I had a child who needed a lighter schedule, I might change the Arthur schedule to allow two weekly slots for each Arthur assignment and then cut either Shakespeare or Plutarch this term. This particular child shouldn't need a lighter schedule, so I will leave all of that in. I also need to decide which Arthur we are going to use. Sometimes I let my kids choose between either Pyle or Green, but this year I'm choosing Green and will put Pyle on the free read shelf. The chart has the schedule for Green already, so I don't need to make any changes to that row.
I added two rows, one for Shakespeare and one for Plutarch, and I deleted those two rows from the daily/weekly section. In the Plutarch row, I changed the label to the name of the person we'll be studying (from the Plutarch rotation) and then put numbers 1-12 in the weekly assignments. For Shakespeare, I often switch things up based on interest and age appropriateness. I looked at the Shakespeare rotation, but I also need to look at the schedules I made for the last year to see which plays we did (since I can't remember). This year's assigned plays should work fine; we didn't read any of them last year, and none of them should be a problem for this child. I'm actually going to go ahead and add those titles to the schedule in terms 2 and 3 also, right now, just to save the work later on.
Shakespeare has to be manually scheduled. I usually list each scene number (I-1, I-2, and so on) on a sheet of paper, then count the pages in each scene and note them next to the scene number. Then I schedule over 11 weeks, trying to keep each week roughly even but mostly read complete scenes. In week 12, we plan to watch a movie version if possible.
Poetry is daily, so I put four O's in each block, two on top and two on bottom, so we can cross them off as it's done each week.
Now to the Daily Work list. Copywork moves up in between Bible and History, and gets a row of four O's in each block because it's daily. Recitation moves up between Geography and Science and also gets the row of O's. I work down the Daily list, moving items up into the correct alphabetical placement in the main schedule page and adding the row of O's.
While I'm at it, I also rearrange the rows in the main part of the Term 1 schedule so the categories are alphabetical. I still haven't decided what to do with Geography, but for now I just move it to where it belongs.
If I needed to lighten the load, I might make Latin only once a week, or do the modern foreign language twice a week and Latin twice a week.
I add a category that I call Enrichment. It has artist and composer (which are each done every other week so they count together as one item per week), and then I add other odd tasks that are done once a week. Exactly what goes in there changes from term to term. For artist and composer, I'm scheduling a term behind because we start school in July, before the new selections are released for the year. Now that all the rotations are basically done, I could stop doing that, but I still do it that way. I will also include Drawing, Nature Study, and Handicraft in this category this term, I think. Before the term begins, I will decide exactly what we will do for those three subjects. I may even add specific assignments to the schedule for some of them.
The official schedule currently doesn't list Dictation, Written Narration, or Map Drill. (It should, so I've posted in the Typos thread in the AO forum so that can be corrected.) It does list Timeline, Geography, and Grammar, all of which still need to be added to the main part of my Term 1 schedule. Timeline could fit under Bible, which only has three assignments at most each week right now. Dictation, Written Narration, and Grammar could all go in one spot, but I actually want to schedule Written Narration daily for this particular student.
I'm going to add a category called English which will include Dictation and Grammar. I need to decide how often I will do each. This student did Grammar frequently in the first two terms of Year 4, so I think maybe we will do it only once a week this term. And since we're new to Dictation, once a week is probably good for that too. And I think only have two assignments in this category each week will give us some flexibility to put them on days that are less busy.
I'm going to add the Long's Home Geography assignments to the Geography category. And then I'll include Map Drill there as well. That category will only have two or three assignments each week, but that's ok. It will also help make our weeks more flexible. We have four assignments for Long's over the term, and I will try to put each of them into a week where we have only three Bible assignments. They aren't in that category, but it will help balance the workload anyway. I actually shifted some of the assignments for Answering the Cry and Trial and Triumph so that I could more evenly schedule Long's while still keeping the load balanced. I could have put Long's under Bible officially, because these labels aren't that important, but I didn't bother.
I will go through in a bit and put specific assignments for some subjects like Shakespeare and the biography. But otherwise, this schedule is done. Oh, but it's not! I just glanced at my shelf and noticed Physics Lab in a Housewares Store. This is a book that's optional, and I forgot to add it. I will add it, and I will decide how to schedule it. I've scheduled it before, but I will check to see if I want to adjust that schedule, because some of those books that I first scheduled long ago have schedules I don't love anymore. I'm going to put it in Geography, since Science is full and so is History (which could otherwise have taken Story of Inventions).
