Setting up a schedule that works is one of the most important and complicated tasks that a homeschool teacher needs to do. There needs to be a yearly schedule for everything that needs to be done in the academic year. A monthly and weekly schedule to break all the work into manageable sized pieces. Also there has to be some back up plan in the contingency that the scheduled work did not happen the way that it was supposed. It can be quite a headache to reschedule hours of the homeschool classroom mid session. Here are two ways to schedule subjects that may work well together.
Block Schedules
As the name suggests in block schedules you block off a period of time for fixed activities or subject studies. For example you can block two hours of study for Mathematics and one hour for Science on Monday and Tuesday. Then you can block of one hour for reading and two hours for writing on Wednesday and Thursday. Followed by two hours dedicated to arts and crafts, and one hour of current affairs on Friday. The idea is to have a large chunk of time available to your homeschool students in which they can explore the subject in as much depth as they want. It also has the added benefit of keeping the daily schedule simple for the teacher. The actual subjects will depend on their grade level and subjects.
Loop Schedules
This is a concept where you have a list of activities that you want to do with the homeschool students, but you don’t fix a time or date for them. For instance cooking, singing, musical instrument practice, sports, are all things that you want them to do, but don’t have a fixed time slot on the schedule. You can get to these activities on the list when you have a relatively free day from the block schedule. The idea is to use the list to keep the homeschool students gainfully employed even when they have finished the formal studies for the day. Block and loop schedules tend to work well together.