Mix It With Brains Part I
Personalizing AmblesideOnline
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 schedule is a suggestion, an example of one way those books and other work could be scheduled through the year. It's a good suggestion, and I think most of us are wise to stick to it most of the time. If you are new to this, you especially should be cautious about making big changes. But you may want to take the weekly schedule and arrange it so that it’s easier to know what work you want to do each day. I have often scheduled full AO terms for my students, without removing or subbing, but I have always massaged the presentation, the way the schedule looks, to fit our needs.
AmblesideOnline offers the weekly schedule as both a list (which is the full schedule with the most complete information) and a chart. The chart has abbreviated information and sometimes omits options for the sake of space. If you want to work from the list schedule, you'll probably want to copy it and paste it into your preferred editing software so that you can make changes and print them. The charts can be downloaded as Microsoft Word (.doc) or Open Office (.odt), both formats that can be edited, or as Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) which you just print as-is. I think Microsoft Word uploads to Google Docs better than Open Office, if that matters to you. Open Office software is open source and can be installed for free.
When I started with AmblesideOnline, the chart schedules didn’t exist. The website only showed you the weekly list, so at first that’s what I used. I put little underlines next to each item so we could check it off, and I added to it the daily work so I had our whole list in one place. We counted the weekly assignments each week, divided by the number of days we had available for school that week, and used the result to see how many weekly assignments we should do each day. If an assignment was particularly long or difficult, I could work with that as my single student and I negotiated what to do each day.
But when I added a second student, I found it hard to manage with the list. Juggling two students plus a preschooler and a toddler didn’t leave me time to sit and work out a plan each day, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to wing it for both students. I had to find a more structured way to plan each student’s weeks and days. If you visit the Scheduling page on the AmblesideOnline website, under Resources, you’ll find lots of ideas for different ways to work with the weekly schedule. I’m going to talk about mine in this post, but visit that page to see others.
Ever since I added my second student, I prefer to work from the chart format of the schedule and use the list as a reference when I need more information, but if this is your first time working with a particular year, it might be a good idea to read through the full schedule from the website before you start working with the chart (if you are going to use the chart). I download a fresh copy of the chart to start my planning. I look through the booklist carefully, and I read the footnotes. The footnotes often have valuable information. Don't assume that since it's in a footnote it's not important.
The chart format schedules that AmblesideOnline offers have less detail than the list schedule, and if you see a conflict between the two, you can assume that the list is correct. (In that case, please post in the Tech Support area of the forum to let us know about the error!) The chart has a row for each book or other assigned resource. Each column on the chart represents one week in the term. If you look across the row, you see each assignment for that book for the entire term. If you look down the column, you see each assignment in the week. The daily/weekly work that’s just ongoing and not scheduled out is listed separately after the weekly reading assignments.
When I plan for the term, I start with the chart for the year I’m planning. I start with a fresh chart from the website—I do not use a chart I’ve already edited for a different student. All of my children used AmblesideOnline. I never used a term schedule from one child for another child though--I always started fresh with the current AO term schedule and adjusted for each child. That's because each child had different strengths and weaknesses, our family situation was different each time a particular year came along, and my own understanding of how to schedule changed over time. The daily schedule that worked for one child would not be appropriate for another child, even when I wasn't changing the weekly work.
Assuming I am making no substitutions for any scheduled books, and usually I am not, I look at the chart and start moving rows around to group books into subjects or categories. I do this so that I can really see what the daily workload is going to be like. This is why I like to use the chart as my base, because I can more easily see the workload for each week.
As I move the rows around to put similar assignments together, I also move up into the main part of the chart the daily and weekly work. I want to see ALL the work together. I add rows for any assignments I will make that aren't already included, such as additional foreign language assignments or instrument practice. I think most things are listed on the chart now, but you may find something that isn't.
When I'm arranging the rows to put similar work together, I am creating chunks that represent daily assignments. So I might have one chunk that has literature in it, and I am wanting to have four assignments in that chunk each week because in our home we have a four-day school week. If you have a five-day school week, you would have five assignments in your chunks.
If I have split some literature assignments into multiple readings during the week because I think that particular child will need to read smaller portions at a sitting, each of those readings gets a row so I can see them as separate daily assignments.
If I end up with more than four literature readings, I may create a second literature category or I may move the extra into another chunk that doesn't have enough readings for every day. The category headings are fairly arbitrary, so I don’t really mind moving a book into a category that doesn’t really describe that book.
Some years, especially in the first three years, I organize the books more by difficulty and length than by subject. If I have a category with the really tough books in it, we’ll be reading one of those each day rather than having one day with two of them.
Sometimes, a row may have assignments only on some of the weeks in a term, and in those cases I sometimes move assignments around a bit from week to week so that those sporadic assignments in one row and sporadic assignments in another row are on different weeks and so add up to make one assignment per week even though it’s two different rows.
I want one assignment every day in each of the categories, even if those assignments come from more books than I have days because some of the books aren’t read every week. I mention this just to encourage you that you can move assignments from one week to another to make the schedule more balanced from week to week.
As we are adjusting the schedule, deciding what to keep, what to replace, what to remove, what to adjust, we need to keep principles in mind so that we are still providing a feast. As I go through the schedule for the term, I am thinking about some of Charlotte Mason's principles.
- I want to keep the readings and other work short. Short, of course, is relative, and will vary based on the age and attention of the student.
A typical six year old and a typical 15 year old will have vastly different thresholds for attention. Even at the same age, two students may need different amounts of reading in a single assignment. Charlotte Mason, in Volume 1, says that the shortness of the lessons “. . . keeps the child's wits on the alert and helps to fix his attention. . .” - I want to vary the type of work we are doing, so that we don’t do all the same type of work one after the other. Charlotte tells us, again in Volume 1, that lessons should be “judiciously alternated” with the principle of “a 'thinking' lesson first, and a 'painstaking' lesson to follow.” So a reading needs to be followed by a subject that isn't primarily reading.
- I want to include varied subjects. We aren’t just doing book work; even if I have to cut back, I want to keep as many different types of work as I can. In the preface to Volume 6, Charlotte Mason mentions ‘. . . physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art. . . .” plus of course “many living books.” (pp. 154-158) She says, “The knowledge should be various, for sameness in mental diet does not create appetite (i.e., curiosity).”
So I want to include books on varied topics, too. - I want to use living books. AO of course helps tremendously with that, but if I need to substitute a book, I look for a replacement that’s written with an author’s voice and is full of ideas. In the preface to Volume 3, Charlotte Mason tells us that “. . . a school-book should be a medium for ideas, and not merely a receptacle for facts.” In her 20 principles in Volume 6, she says, “Knowledge should be communicated in well-chosen language, because his attention responds naturally to what is conveyed in literary form.” Literary form does not mean in a story but rather in well written language that conveys ideas.
Once I have all the assignments on the chart and I have arranged them into chunks of work that are roughly equally distributed, I can see what the workload for each day and each week will look like. This can look overwhelming, but I try to assume that my child will be able to do more than I think. I might assign times to each section just to give myself an estimate of how long the days would be with the schedule as it is.
When I have adjusted the term schedule for a particular student into a form that I think will work for that student, I make some formatting changes to help make it more visual, and I create a daily/weekly checklist that can be used throughout the term to help the student manage his own daily work.
I did not ever try to figure out how to mesh all of my children's schedules into one master schedule. I tried a timed schedule, but too many unexpected crises pop up so that times were impossible to stick to. Managing the chaos worked better for us, even if it was frustrating for me.
I plan at least one term in full and gather all the needed supplies in one place. I have used many organizational systems for our supplies over the years, but I can't say any one system worked perfectly. You just keep trying. During exam week at the end of the term, I put the schedules for the next term in their final form, making adjustments based on what worked and what didn't during this past term.
That’s the basic process I use. You will develop a process that works for you. You can see mine all laid out and you can even see my thought process as I work through specific terms of specific years in some of my planning posts here.
The chart works for me because I can easily see how much work is assigned each week, and therefore each day, because I have rows grouped in sets of four weekly assignments, so each set of four (or so) rows represents one daily assignment.
My way of visualizing this may not be what works for you. The Scheduling page on the AO website has a lot of information about scheduling options, and it has links to different people's posts about how they schedule. The AmblesideOnline forum also has help for you. Rather than trying to search for what you want, just post there. (If we think your post will fit better in a different area, we’ll move it for you, so post wherever you think best.) You’ll get a lot of different perspectives on the forum, and you’ll be able to ask questions or clarify what you need.
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