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 b...

  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...

 This summer I will schedule Year 7 for the fifth time, although this is the first time I will be scheduling Year 7 since the big changes in 2023.  The first time I scheduled Year 7 was before the addition of most of the science, so it also was significantly different from the three Year 7s of my middle students.  We are also participating in an online discussion group this year, so I will have to adjust our schedule for some of the books in order to match the discussion group schedule.  We will be reading Plutarch with an in-person group, so I will not be adding Plutarch to our schedule at all this year. As I always do, I begin by saving a new copy of the Year 7 chart from the AO website .  I use the regular year chart rather than the "basic" or "lite" chart to begin from.  If I were lightening this year, I would still start with the regular schedule and then consult the basic schedule for ideas, but I don't expect to need to lighten this year for this stu...

This is my fifth time going through AmblesideOnline 's Year 6 with a student, but the first time I've documented the Year 6 scheduling process. Year 6 is substantially different this time than it was the previous times, so I will have some decisions to make. I will mostly be scheduling Term 1 of Year 6 for this post, although if I make additions that affect the other terms I will usually go ahead and put those in so I don't forget them later.  The first thing I do is download the Word format (.doc) chart from the AO website . I then open my Google Drive to the folder where I keep schedules, then choose Upload a File and load this Word document. Then I have to tell Google to save this as a Google Doc. Then I rename it to designate which school year and which child this schedule is for. Then I delete the .doc file from my Google Drive since now I have a Google Docs file instead. Next, I scan down the list of books on the left side of the chart, looking for any title...

  This year is my fifth time scheduling AmblesideOnline's Year 5.  I've  previously blogged about the process I used for one of those instances. 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 ...

  This is my fifth time scheduling AmblesideOnline's Year 4, but Year 4 is a bit different this time than it was the other four times I've been through it.  Also, it's been several years since I've looked closely at Year 4, so this is almost a fresh look at the year. This particular Year 4 student will be on the older end of the range because of a fall birthday.  Also, this student has great reading and writing, so that will impact some of my scheduling choices.  Other times I have scheduled Year 4 have looked different based on the needs of those students. To begin, I visit the AmblesideOnline website (amblesideonline.org), found Year 4 on the By Year menu, clicked through to the Year 4 schedule, then clicked on DOC in the list next to Choose a Format.  This downloads a chart version of the Year 4 schedule in Microsoft Word (.doc) format.  I think this format loads into Google Drive more smoothly than the Open Office (.odt) format does (although Open Offic...

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

I've always used flexible schedules for our school time.  When my oldest was in the early grades, one year I tried putting together a detailed schedule for her with specific times for each subject.  We couldn't stick to the times, as anyone with several young children at home (especially with a baby) will understand, and my estimates for how long things would take were usually too high, but just plotting the work out like that gave us a sense of how much was realistic to expect in a day. Since then, I've used other scheduling methods to help juggle the needs of multiple kids (I have four school-aged and one preschooler right now) as well as to train for independence.  You can see more about how this has worked for us in these posts: Sample Term Schedules Organizing Our AO Year Categorizing Our Schoolwork Organizing Our Homeschool This type of organization of our day really worked well for us, but for two of my four school-age kids it wasn't working as well...

Once they turn five, each of my kids begins choosing and helping to prepare one meal each week.  I work closely with each child at first, and gradually I turn over tasks for the child to perform without assistance.  How fast that happens varies from child to child and meal to meal. Five years ago, I blogged about a new way of organizing our meal plannin g.  I was entering the final stages of a complicated pregnancy with a high probability of complications after the birth, and I needed the meal plans to be functional without much help from me each week.  This system, described in that earlier post, worked well for us with few changes for five years.  But this summer I decided we needed to streamline the process more as well as to shake it up a bit since we had gotten into a rut and, although the food choices were repetitive and boring, deciding what to cook each week was too time-consuming for our current schedule. Pockets store cards not in use. I sorte...

In planning for our upcoming  AmblesideOnline  Year 5 Term 2, I'm adding in the optional science book  Physics Lab in a Hardware Store  by Bob Friedhoffer . I scheduled out  Term 1  and Term 2  already.  For this third 12-week term, we'll divide up the readings like this: pp. 78-80 pp. 80-81 pp. 81-82 pp. 83-85 pp. 85-87 pp. 88-89 pp. 89-90 pp. 91-92 pp. 93-95 pp. 96-97 pp. 97-98 pp. 99-100 Supplies Items to View (These aren't necessarily required in person, as the book has illustrations of them and they aren't needed for activities.) window shades compound pulley adjustable wrench vise vise grip bolt cutters plumb line fisherman's scale level various saws box of nails automobile jacks Items to Use (These are needed for observations and activities and may be required more than once.) two strong wooden poles about 1 yard long 30 piece of strong rope

In planning for our upcoming  AmblesideOnline  Year 5 Term 2, I'm adding in the optional science book  Physics Lab in a Hardware Store  by Bob Friedhoffer . I scheduled out Term 1 already.  For this second 12-week term, we'll divide up the readings like this: pp. 51-54 pp. 54-57 pp. 57-59 pp. 60-63 pp. 63-64 pp. 64-66 pp. 67-68 pp. 69-70 pp. 71-72 pp. 72-73 pp. 73-74 pp. 75-77 Supplies Items to view (These aren't necessarily required in person, as the book has illustrations of them and they aren't needed for activities.) claw hammer pry bar various wrenches spring clamps wheelbarrow casters screwdriver circular saw brace hand drill Items to use (These are needed for observations and activities and may be required more than once.) 24-inch piece of lumber 6-inch piece of lumber ruler 5-pound weight (bag of flour, etc. will work) fisherman's scale heavy string pliers yard stick outdoor faucet screwdriver screw ...