How I Scheduled Year 10

My oldest will begin Year 10 in a few weeks. Yesterday I visited the AmblesideOnline website, pulled up the Year 10 schedule page, and downloaded the .doc version of the Detailed schedule. I uploaded that to Google Drive and shared it with my dd and dh, granting them editing privileges. Dd can participate in the making of her schedule.  (The Basic schedule for Year 10 probably looks substantially different from the Detailed schedule.  Beginning in Year 7, the Basic schedule is no longer just the Detailed schedule without showing other options but rather is a lighter schedule that has fewer books read more slowly and in some cases even uses different books.)

Today she and I looked over the Term 1 booklist, pulling out some of our physical books to examine and consider. We know we must pare down. For instance, Year 10 Term 1 has books scheduled under Theology, Worldview, and Citizenship. We decided to just keep the Citizenship titles on our schedule for this term. The others will be free reads this time.

We also removed Churchill, not because we don't love his books but because we must pare down History. We replaced Uncle Tom's Cabin with Frederick Douglass' autobiography.  We looked at our books of Montaigne's and Emerson's essays, to see if the scheduled essays were included in our volumes.  Some were, and for those that were not, we substituted other essays that we did have in our books.

In the meantime, I have added three extra rows to Bible and am cutting and pasting the various passages assigned each week so that each passage is in a separate row.  Bible is now complete!

History has already had two books removed and a few essays substituted.  Now I need to add the replacement book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.  This done, it's time to consider the Historical Documents.

As much as possible, I will add links to the documents to a Pinterest board for Year 10.  That way it will be easy for dd to find the documents when they are assigned.  The AO Year 10 booklist has links to the recommended documents, which makes adding the links to Pinterest easy.  As I take care of this, I'm also shifting around the scheduled essays and documents so that no week has both a document and an essay assigned.

In the meantime, I am reconsidering removing Churchill.  This year, spending some time on world history might be of particular benefit, and since we've removed some other books we may have room to add Churchill back.  So I'll talk to dd about that tomorrow.

OK, so Churchill is going back in .  We'll also be adding Mommy Diagnostics by Shonda Parker as a lifeskills option.

I don't really care about the labels on our schedule sections.  I just care about balancing the workload throughout each week and each term.  So I added Churchill to Government, since History already had four assignments each week.  I also moved Essays and Historical Documents to Government.  Now it also has four assignments each week, so those two sections are complete.

Three short stories are scheduled this term, and Invitation to the Classics has four empty weeks.  I will shift those two rows around so that neither is scheduled in the same week as the other, so they will count as one row in a section.  How to Read a Book can go along with them.  I'll put one of those chapters in week one, where perhaps Invitation will be a bit light (and Ourselves has no assignment anyway), and the other in week seven, where I have no Invitation or short story.

I moved Poetry down to Daily Work.  I removed Walden from Science because we will need to focus our science readings more; Walden will be a free read.

To the science selections, I added a half module of Apologia Chemistry each week.  I am not scheduling science labs since those will be done irregularly, possibly with friends.  I am adding in Mystery of the Periodic Table, a Year 6 AO selection that this daughter missed because she did Year 6 before it was added.

After some consideration, we decided to use Universe Next Door in Citizenship, but spread it over two terms.  (We'll use Term 2's selection as a free read later, after the lit selections it references have been read.)

We selected our drawing book, and I assigned lessons for each week, keeping it short.  I added the artist and composer selections, Plutarch, and selected a handicraft.  History of Art does not have weekly assignments, so I divided the term's section into weekly work.

Per the AO booklist, we're adding in some lifeskills each term.  This year we're going to read Mommy Diagnostics, so I added a row to the chart and filled in weekly assignments for the first part of the book.  We're also going to read one that isn't currently on the list (but I'm lobbying for it), Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food.

I've added rows for the written work I want from her weekly: Book of Centuries, nature notebook, commonplace, and map drill.  Wait!  I forgot typing, again, so I'll take off commonplace, which she really does on her own anyway, and add typing.  (She works on typing up a public domain text that isn't yet typed.)

We aren't doing any formal English grammar this term, so that goes off the schedule.  Current events is coming off too because I don't want to track that.

I need to add a multi-day per week foreign language plan.  This year we'll focus on Spanish only because only one language can count for high school credit here.  Her other languages she can study on her own time.  For Spanish, I've listed two days a week reading from and translating from a Spanish reader and two days a week working out of a Spanish grammar.  For her, I won't schedule specific lessons each week this term.

That takes care of all weekly work listed on the master schedule.  Now I pull up last year's schedule to see what other items I may need to add.

I have not made any essay assignments.  I really don't have a good place in the schedule to put essays, and we'll be doing a written narration daily anyway.  Dd already writes really well, so this isn't a high priority right now.  I think I'll just give her a single assignment to work on over the term, some longer writing project, and maybe ask her to do some more creative written narrations this term.

Unless I think of something else I've missed, this should be complete except for Shakespeare and the recitation passages.

Year 10 Term 1 Sample Chart

Year 10 Term 1 Student Checklist  - I slide this into a dry erase sleeve so we can wipe it off each day/week and start over.  The right side is a daily checklist.  The left side is weekly.

UPDATE:  I have a newer edition of Evaluating Books, so I will be modifying that row on the schedule.  I will schedule it so we do approximately 3 topics per week (fewer some weeks) so we can still finish in Term 1.  It's about 20-ish pages longer than the edition scheduled in AO.

Sample Term Schedules

I use AmblesideOnline in our homeschool, and I appreciate the chart-format schedules that are provided for each year.  Before I use those schedules, though, I modify them to make them work for our family.  Here are some samples of a shortened version of my edited schedules for a few different years to give you an idea of what these look like.  (The samples show only a few weeks of each term so as not to violate AmblesideOnline's license by reproducing the schedules on another site.)

Two terms of Year 1

Year 2 chart

One term of Year 3
Another Year 3 chart

Year 4 chart
Another Year 4 chart, just Term 1

Two terms of Year 5
Another Year 5 chart

Year 6 chart
Another Year 6 chart

Year 7 chart

Year 8 chart

Year 9 chart
Another Year 9 Chart
Yet Another Year 9 Chart
One More Year 9 Chart

Year 10 chart

Year 11 chart 

Briefly, I follow this basic process to prepare the schedules for the term ahead:

I download the art prints from the link at the bottom of the term's art schedule on the AmblesideOnline Art page and send them to a copy shop (FedEx Kinkos, Office Depot, or anywhere else that makes color copies) to be printed.  (I generally upload the file to the website and order the prints that way, then go and pick them up.)
I find the music for the composer study.
I buy the folk songs and burn them to a CD to play in the car.
I print maps for our history and geography and sometimes even for literature.  Remember that in each Forms area (under AO Curriculum Help) of the AmblesideOnline forum there's a thread stuck to the top that has links to the map threads for each year, where you can find the links you need.
I make sure we have copywork and grammar at least sort of figured out.
I add to the chart for the term, after the table for that term, the recitation passages that student will be learning.

Then I adjust the chart schedule.
I make sure all the subjects/activities we want to cover each day or week are listed.
I group together weekly subjects that seem to fit together in content type or difficulty.  Sometimes I change this later to balance the workload across the week, but this is where I start.
I look at each grouping of subjects to see how much work each week in the term will have.  I really want only four assignments in any particular grouping each week, although older students might have five.  Occasionally I'll shift an assignment from one week to another to balance out the load.


I then create a checklist.
I list all the weekly work in one column and every weekly category plus all daily work in another column.  The second column should all be checked off each day, and one item from each section of the weekly column should be checked off each day.  This isn't as necessary now that we've been doing this so long; generally my kids can work off of the chart, but at first this made the schedule easier for them to manage.

Example Checklist for One Term of Year 2
Example Checklist for Year 3 (includes checkpoints)
Example Checklist for Year 5
Example Checklist for Year 7
Example Checklist for Year 10

I hope this helps to encourage you if you're having trouble visualizing all this.  It does take a little time, although terms 2 and 3 are always easier than term 1 and each successive year I get better at this. 

(Updated on 7/29/2020 to correct links that had changed.
Updated on 6/5/2023.)