Scheduling Signs and Seasons

AmblesideOnline uses Signs and Seasons in Years 7-9.  The official schedules for those years include broad ranges of the book for each term.  It's up to each family to decide how to spread that work across the term.  Here's one way of doing that.  There's no magic to this, so consider this just an example.  You could divide up the work vastly differently and have it still be as good or better as this arrangement.

Each column in the table is one week.  In each week, you'll have one passage to read (except where that week has dashes) and two field activities.  Generally, you want to keep a record of the field activities in your field notebook or journal.

Sample Signs and Seasons Schedule

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.)