Piney Woods Homeschool

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 bo...

  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...