Whew!  I’ve just been reading the latest Charlotte Mason blog carnival, which is all about planning and scheduling.  I am so impressed, overawed, in fact.  I am almost surprised that nobody is using an actual project manager to plan out their kids’ education.  I was halfway through reading when I felt prompted to post our actual schedule below.  Then I realised that there is a difference between describing what you do and how you arrive at that.  So I thought I would try again.

The way I set about homeschooling is almost more Charlotte Mason than what we actually do.  I have a principle, towards which I am tending, and it automatically directs my actions. I have an idea of the educated adult that I would like to help my daughter become.  That applies to knowledge, skills, habits, character and so on.  I don’t usually find it difficult to see what my daughter could/should work on next.  Sometimes it is fiddly to find the right resource or method, to judge whether the moment is precisely right for something or how long it might take. For example, I feel a study of history is important, but I waited a long time to introduce it, and made a number of trial attempts, before she proved to be ready for it.

I don’t plan actual content in the sense of deciding that we will study say ‘forests’, ‘magnets’ and ‘ancient Greece’.  Themes and content seem to arise spontaneously, and I make no particular efforts to plan or control them, other than finding the resources at the right moment.  At the moment we seem to be entering a ‘seas and oceans’ theme.  My mind is gravitating towards the various novels, poems, documentary films and other resources we might have concerning the sea, and entertaining the possibilities of boating trips.  But there is no plan that says we will have read x by Christmas.  My principle doesn’t demand that specific content areas have to be covered at specific times, only that our daughter should have a broad basis of knowledge by the time she is in her teens.

My second big principle has to do with how I think a child’s daily life is best spent.  I don’t necessarily think exactly the same lifestyle is best for all children, but I try to find the best one for my daughter.  There is a certain balance between structure and free time, work and play, attention to things that have to be done, time in which you have to think of your own activity by yourself, social time and outdoor time, quiet time and family time….  that works for us. The amount and type of ‘school’ she does has as much to do with what I consider to be the optimum lifestyle for her, as with what I think she needs to learn.

I find that with those two principles in front of me, I don’t have to do an awful lot of planning as such.  I do spend time thinking about and refining my principles, and obviously, as she gets older, the ‘ideal daily life’ changes anyway.  I do tweak what we do accordingly.  I do record things so that I see what really is happening, and what content is getting covered.   But otherwise, I more or less make it up as I go along.