Homeschool planning is in full-swing. I’m taking a break from the files, paper, and charts to document my general plans. I’m doing this to make sure I haven’t traveled too far from shore while swimming in the details, but I’m also hoping other moms who may be wondering how to make sense of it all will find this little glimpse inside my mind helpful. It’s nice to see the finished product of people’s beautiful lesson plans and schedules, but this will give a little more detail about the thinking behind those pretty charts.

For the 2018 – 2019 school year, my children will be in 3rd, 2nd, and Kindergarten. I’ll also have a (really cute) toddler hanging out on my lap and around my feet all day.

Scheduling: We’ve always followed the Charlotte Mason model of three 11-week school terms, but historically, I’ve added a 4th summer term. During the first 3 terms I would mostly follow an existing CM-inspired curriculum, and I’d use the summer to cover things that we didn’t get a chance to do/complete or that I felt were left out. Much of this inevitably ended up being related to black history, artists, poets, etc. so I have jokingly referred to the summer as my “black term.” Funny, but also a little sad. This year, I’m trying something new.

I’m still scheduling the 11-week terms, but I’m putting them into a year-round 4-day homeschooling schedule with a week off every 6 weeks. I’m not actually planning to take that whole week off off because we’ll be doing some projects and awesome field trips during those weeks. We also may catch up on things that didn’t get done before, but the break week will certainly look entirely different than our normal schedule. I’m hanging on to the concept that a change is as good as a break.

So what will we be doing with that 5th day?

We’ll be spending a full day each week outside. Yes, y’all. I’m finally going to put my Chacos® where my mouth is and officially schedule in hours and hours and hours of unstructured outdoor time into my lesson plans. We’ve always spent time outside. A lot of time. But not a whole, whole lotta time. Well, now that’s changing. After our Worldschooling trip, I’ve felt highly convicted about the children’s obvious and intense need to be outdoors. Their love of sticks, dirt, and rocks came through loud and strong.

This is new territory for me, and I’m a little scared. Make that really scared. Giving up a whole day at home is not something I ever thought I would willingly agree to, but it feels right. I’m excited to see where it leads us. Hopefully, not back inside.

Lesson plans: We will be studying the 1800s this year. Think Westward expansion, pioneers, Civil War, etc. I am truly in love with the concept of going deep on a century or so of history each school year. Studying the past in this way has allowed the whole family to become fully immersed in a time period, and it makes choosing books, vacations, and field trips much easier. We kicked off the history rotation last week with a road trip to Illinois and Missouri. I’ll be posting the details of our travels here soon, but essentially we visited multiple historic homes, buildings, and monuments from the time period and have already learned so much.

Our artists, composers, songs, poetry, and other subjects will flow from our chosen time period. And the time period also guided my book selections of historical fiction and biographies for the older children to read this year. It still amazes me that the subject I abhorred the most throughout my own education has become the nucleus of the curriculum that I’m laying before my own children. I pray that they enter adulthood with a genuine love for knowing about the women and men who walked these roads before us.

I’m intentionally not sharing the specific list of books that we’re using this year because I’m mostly following the Alveary curriculum from the Charlotte Mason Institute, and it would be violation of their policies to post the book list publicly. However, I can say that I have been so delighted with many of the inclusive choices presented in this year’s curriculum. So much so that I don’t anticipate needing my “black term” this year. I will, however, be including some outside texts that address specific aspects of the black experience in America during this time, and I will share those book titles in a future post.

Homeschooling commitments away from home: We are part of 2 homeschooling groups – the one I started in 2016 to support other black homeschoolers in our area and another one that we’ve been a part of for years. Neither group is diverse (one is mostly all black and the other is mostly all white), but both are full of wonderful families who have become great friends, and we’ll continue to participate in both this year. With those groups, we participate in field trips, celebrations, enrichment classes, performances, and other related activities. The group I run also has a monthly book club that we do one afternoon a month.

Aside from those ad-hoc activities, we’ll be getting together weekly with a few other CM families to work on several subjects together – hymns & folk songs, paper sloyd, composer study, artist study, nature journaling, movement, and Spanish songs & rhymes which I’ll be teaching. We’ll also include a little show & tell during snack time to give the kids a chance to practice speaking in front of a group.

Extra-curricular activities: I am super committed to not being over-scheduled. It took years of excitedly chasing down a bunch of very interesting (to me) and worthy (to me) activities for my kids to find out that they really just want to run around outside and find lizards. My children are still young. They have plenty of time to try things and develop passions, and I trust that they’ll let me know when they’re ready to experiment. In the meantime, I’m content to just let them be until they express interests.

We enjoy time outside the walls of our home, but my family is definitely happiest and healthiest when the biggest chunk of our time is spent at home. With that being said, the children do have interests that I want to support. We usually choose our extra-curricular activities based on something they’ve seen or heard and found interesting, and I aim for at least one of the activities to be something physically active.

My other preferences are that the activities be geographically close to our home, reasonably affordable, purposeful, and enjoyable. I don’t want to waste my family’s precious time on things that the kids feel very “meh” about, so I always ask, “Will participating in this make your toes curl?” They know exactly what that means, and it helps them filter out things that may sound cool but don’t actually excite them, personally.

This term, my 8 year old will be in volleyball. The program is a collaboration between our YMCA and a local volleyball club. She played in the spring and loved it so she chose to play again this fall. My 7 year old is taking ballet/jazz at a small local ballet studio. She also tried it out in the spring, and has declared that “dancing was made for me.” As much as I encourage the kids to follow their hearts, sometimes I accidentally insert my own practicality into the equation. In this case, I tried to convince my wild & free oldest to take ballet with her sister and signed the dance-loving youngest up for a one-time volleyball skills class. Both instances resulted in tears. Oops! They really are so different, and you’d think that at least their own mother would respect those differences.

Travel plans: We don’t have any international travel plans on the horizon for this school year, but we will definitely be taking a few road trips – some out-of-state and others local. The school-related trips will be focused on the time period we’re studying this year, and the “purely-pleasure” trips will involve beach or mountains. That’s as far as I’ve gotten on travel right now, but I’ll surely post about where we end up.

White space and rest: Each year, my weekly schedule becomes more and more detailed. I used to roll my eyes and moms who seemed to write down and schedule every single aspect of their lives. Where’s the spontaneity? The flexibility? The FUN? Yeah, well I’ve cashed the first two in for a heavy dose of sanity and a fair shot at the last. My schedule for this year is more detailed than ever before. Rather than schedule in where we have to go, I scheduled in what time we have to leave the house in order to be on time (a totally different beast) and even when I’ll prepare dinner.

I know it’s impossible to live each day according to my pretty color-coded paper, but having it all written out gives me one less thing to remember…or forget, in my case. But more importantly, it allows me to visualize, in a snapshot, how much time I’ve built in for my family to rest and just “be.” The white space – and it literally is white on my schedule – shows me the time we have to flow and hang without any expectations or schedules. It represents our freedom from the burdens of being efficient and effective in everything we do. White space guides my decisions and helps me say no to the many wonderful activities available in our area that would suck the life from my family.

School officially starts back up for us next week, and I know that the prep time I’ve put into our materials, home, and pace-of-life will pay out again and again. As always, I’m excited to see where this year will take us. Oh…and I’m also utterly exhausted. Just keeping it real, of course!