I was chatting on a workboxes homeschooling group, having one of those conversations where a mom asks if we all think she may be overloading her exasperated kids with “too much work” (the answer is invariably “yes” in these conversations, in case you’re curious). A lot of times, I find those conversations very exhausting, because they’re about the mom wanting strategies to be able to force her kid to do a lot more boring, tedious stuff, and then doing a lot of flailing because no one gives her any and instead tells her to relax and consider chucking, like, everything. Fortunately, in this case, it wasn’t like that, but had been initiated by a very well-meaning and thoughtful mom whose 7yo was getting frustrated despite the mom’s very best efforts, and she was looking to make the day more enjoyable for the family, a good goal to have imho . During the conversation, she said their school day was lasting over 6 hours, and I said:

Just so you can see a different perspective: That’s over an hour longer than my son’s average workbox day – and he’s in the SIXTH GRADE, and he studies 2 foreign languages, practices 2 musical instruments, reads poetry, Shakespeare, Hymns, logic, Bible devotional, art history, music theory, medieval history, united states geography, literature and astronomy.

Another mom then asked me some questions about how it’s possible to organize my son’s time with the boxes (we don’t call them workboxes, just boxes) in such a way that it takes “so little time.” I think four hours is a lot of time! I thought I would repost my detailed response here. Italics were her questions, the rest is my response. It’s been a good talk, with the other mom asking a lot of good questions that made me think a lot and helped me clarify my own values some more, so hopefully this is helpful to someone. This is an ongoing dialogue, so there will be follow-ups with people’s questions in future posts, but feel free to ask your own! (Some of you longtime readers may notice we’ve changed a lot since starting this school year and are no longer using Ambleside Online’s recommendations. My son is still really interested in the Middle Ages, though, so he asked me to buy a few of the WinterPromise resources to learn more about the Middle Ages. More on this change at a later date!) A few of my answers have been proofread and/or expanded upon from the conversation where it was necessary for greater clarity.

My 6th grader does three subjects at a co-op (one is no homework), plus French, flute, history, and science at home, and it’s really hard for me to schedule all her subjects. Would you mind sharing a sample weekly schedule?

I don’t mind at all

The last few months, we have settled into a comfortable, flexible routine, where we get a much earlier start in the day than we used to. But we are both early morning lallygaggers and I work nights, so we get started later than most families. Typically my son starts his boxes between 10AM and 11AM, we break half an hour for lunch somewhere in there, and we’re done with the boxes by 2:30 or 3:30, depending on what we are doing. We then go out and do errands, or go to the park for a playdate, or other outings or sometimes we just chill out and goof off on the Internet, watch TV, play video games, build robots, or whatever else he’ll feel like doing. I try to schedule all doctor’s appointments for this time, too.

I will say that we don’t do any co-ops (my kid hates them) and I try to keep our field trip type outings for the weekend. We don’t do more than 2 field trips with our local homeschooling groups per month and it’s ONLY if my son seems excited about it, for example, the trip to see a Norman Rockwell exhibit next month. We have a lot of cool weekend and night time outings, but I’m a single mom and have to work, and there are only so many hours in the day! He has a park date weekly and a youth group twice a week at night, and sometimes a playdate with a friend, and that’s about it during the weekdays.

These are things which are not in the boxes, that he either does of his own free will and doesn’t want me to organize for him, or we do together as a family every day:

• Computer programming/Internet surfing/ video game design
• TV. We both like TV a lot and I won’t apologize for that. I’ve written several posts about why I love it and think it’s awesome. I don’t restrict TV in any way, but I do watch things with Shorty and talk about things we watch. Shorty is currently really into marathons of Everybody Hates Chris reruns
• Afternoon walk, weather permitting, approx a mile and a half a day, for exercise and fresh air and chatting and sometimes Shorty likes to take our digital camera and take pictures of our walks and post them on his Facebook (he’s got a great eye for photography!!);
• Instrument practice (guitar and piano) 10-15 min each, though he sometimes will spend hours in the afternoon practicing on his own;
• Morning Bible devotionals and daily Bible reading, which Shorty has requested we do before anything else;
• Bedtime literature. He says he’s too old to call it a bedtime story. *g* Sometimes he reads it out loud, sometimes I do, sometimes we switch off. Currently reading The King’s Fifth by Scott O’Dell, in concurrence with our study of the middle ages. It’s pretty awesome!!

These are the boxes we do daily:

• Latin, Shorty’s pet subject #1 – Getting Started With Latin has turned out to be a big hit;
• Math – typically two worksheets;
• Wordly Wise vocabulary, Book 5 – pet subject #2;
• Some kind of history reading. We have many books on the Middle Ages,  so sometimes we have more than one history reading – reading from the “spine” or main book (currently The Kingfisher’s Atlas of the Medieval World) and then a second book about the subject, usually very brief on each count. We’re talking no more than 2-3 pages, unless he wants to keep reading.
• Geography/ map drawing, pet subject #3.
• Poetry – we just read 1 poem a day from a Walter de la Mare poem book. We don’t discuss it too much or analyze it. We just read it for fun.

These are the boxes we do 2-3 times per week, as our schedule and his mood permits:

• Spanish – We are native speakers, and live in Little Havana, so our focus is vocabulary expansion so that Shorty can communicate with locals more easily;
• Astronomy: short reading, plus occasional notebooking/games – that would be a 2nd box;
• Some kind of history-related project, lapbook or activity – currently we are alternating between a project from The Days of Knights and Dames and lapbooking about knights and castles;
• Christian studies – we did a wonderful Advent study during Christmas that Shorty absolutely fell in love with, and he’s been reading A Little Pilgrim’s Progress;
• Tangrams, which my kid loves, but not too often or he gets tired of them!

These are the subjects we do once per week:

• Nature walks with nature studies,
• Guitar lesson;
• Piano lesson;
• Logic – having great fun with The Fallacy Detective;
• Hymn study with the book and CD, Then Sings My Soul;
• Shakespeare – usually a couple of pages from a “Tales from Shakespeare” book;
• Biography. Currently Diane Stanley’s Joan of Arc. Shorty really loves and gets into biographies and we are discussing organizing a study of inventors and industrial-revolution people (his other favorite historical era) when he finishes his current stuff;
• Grammar – one weekly exercise from Simply Grammar by Karen Andreola for my little budding wordsmith;
• Reading out loud from the McGuffey 3rd Eclectic Reader – he has great dramatic flair

These are the things we only do every other week:

• Juggling, a popular medieval pastime which he’s always wanted to learn anyway;
• Art History OR Composer studies – We alternate between the two. One week we do one, the other week, we do the other. Shorty really gets excited about these, though, so I’m looking to see about doing this more often. Currenttly we are listening to a lot of Edvard Grieg and Sibelius, and leafing through my huge Norman Rockwell book, whose realism in illustration Shorty admires and envies. Fortunately, there is a traveling exhibit of his work right in town!

I’d love to see how you approach scheduling so many topics.

I have my little weekly workbox grid that I made. Because I like to plan for the whole year vs. little-by-little planning, even if I inevitably end up changing a million things as we go along, I printed out 36 of those, one for each week of the “school year,” which is all I have to keep track of for record-keeping purposes, though we do cool stuff almost every day all year long. I put subject dividers between each 12 - twelve weeks in a term, which our private umbrella school requires us to track. 180 days.

I am not married to this schedule in any way.  It is a list of possibilities for the day and nothing more.

I then take each resource and divide it up. If it’s a book, I divide its pages by 180, if it’s something we want to take all year to do. For example, the Latin curriculum he wanted has only 120 lessons. So we figured out that he needs to do about 3-4 lessons per week to finish it by the end of the year. So I go through the 36 weeks and put “Latin lesson #whatever” 3 or 4 times per week all year, until I get to 120. If it’s a shorter book, for example, we are reading the book Medieval Medicine and the Plague which has only 12 chapters, each about 2 pages long, I put it once per week for one term. Or I could put it once every 3 weeks all year, or whatever else had suited us.

NOTE: You do NOT have to plan things out for a whole year. You can divide the resource this way above, or you can plan one or two weeks ahead and not pre-determine how much you’re going to do. Then you’d just write “Legos” or “art/craft” or “Read such and such book.”

I do not feel the need to tell my son what to do all day long. My son has explicitly asked for help organizing his time and attention between his many interests, so I divide it up for him, but of course, if he wants to work ahead or postpone something one day, we do.

Sometimes I have a set amount to cover in a set amount of time. For The King’s Fifth, the novel we are reading right now, which has 31 chapters, I did not want to take months to read it, because we both lose interest and start to find it tedious when that happens, so I decided we’d read one chapter per day, which was 6 weeks if we read one chapter on a weekend. So I put in the “notes” section of my planner for week 1: “The King’s Fifth, Ch 1-5″. And then I put a checkmark as we read them, so I can at least tell where we are if I lose the bookmark. LOL!

FIRST, I do this with what he wants do every day. I fill in all the workboxes all year for those – labor intensive up-front, but saves me tons of time over the year.

THEN, I do this with the things he only wants do a few times a week.

FINALLY I plug in the ones he only does once a week or every other week. I just stick them wherever there’s an empty box!

I try to leave at least one empty box per day for spontaneous projects or for things he didn’t get to the day before or whatever. But it’s not necessary because the stuff we’re doing IS fun for him. If it’s not something he’s enjoying, I chuck it and we try something else or drop it. We have very few “schooly” things in there. I am constantly introducing new and interesting things, and I try to pay very close attention to what my son responds well to and what he doesn’t. I feel the materials should serve the child, not vice versa. I don’t understand why I see so many moms try a curriculum, notice it tanks with the kid, and conclude there’s something wrong with the KID! And then post, “How can I make my kid want to do this thing he hates that I think he should do anyway?” To me this is a backwards approach to education.

I’m guessing you don’t do everything, every day, but how do you decide what you don’t really need to do on a daily basis when so many things like music and foreign language need constant practice?

Some of it, as you saw above, decides itself. It is very obvious that Simply Grammar, with its 39 in-depth lessons, cannot be done every day and fits better as a weekly visitation. A lot of my notions, I got from Charlotte Mason, who really believed in child-gentle interest-whetting vs. a proscribed set of information delivered in a prescribed manner. This is also why we study hymns and Shakespeare, and only once a week. That was her recommendation and we tried it and it seems to work for Shorty. The rest, I take my cue from my son. I don’t think anyone NEEDS to do geography five times a week (or ever, really), but since my kid is endlessly fascinated by maps and state trivia, and thinks it’s great fun, we do.

Also, *I* don’t decide this. We decide it together. If he wanted to read Shakespeare every day, we would. And we only read it once a week because he asks me to read it. I think for him it’s like a little radio play. LOL, as in, ”This week on SHAKESPEARE’S DRAMATIC SOAP OPERA…”

And I realize this goes against conventional wisdom, but I don’t think a foreign language needs daily practice to master, and music practice is something my son is expected to do on his own. We are both musicians, so this isn’t really something he needs a reminder about; it’s just his great passion that he’s currently pursuing. We listen to, talk about and play music all day. I don’t think a child should be forced to play an instrument if s/he doesn’t want to. If s/he wants to play one, I would just be very frank about what’s required. “People who don’t practice the piano every day stink at piano. If you do practice every day, in a very short amount of time, you will be totally awesome at it. It’s up to you what you wanna be!” My son knows I’m honest and that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to music, so I only had to tell him this once!

I think when a child trusts you to respect his comfort zones, they trust your opinions a lot more, instead of finding them suspect and wondering if you’re trying to con him into doing something you think he should be doing, whether he hates it or not.

Do you do homework after dinner or some other trick to be done for the afternoon more quickly?

Nooooo. We do no homework. We are anti-homework! LOL! Once the boxes are done, either just before or just after lunch, his time is totally unscheduled, except that it is convenient for both of us if he showers while I’m making dinner. Otherwise, he does whatever he wants with his time. Basically, the workboxes are just a way for me to help him structure his time. He finds this helpful and encouraging. I am by nature a very UNSTRUCTURED person with a good internal clock, but he’s the opposite, he likes to plot out every minute of his time and has asked me to help him do this, so while it’s more controlling of his time than I would prefer, I need to acknowledge that his preferences are  not my preferences and I use the workboxes to help him in this way.

My son has a large workspace he likes very much because it is a very business-y roll top desk that he says “makes him feel like an executive.” LOL.  I sit next to him and let him do his thing while I work on mylaptop, unless he needs me for something, but if I see he’s taking forever on one box, I will use humor to check in with him (“EARTH TO ELI, DO YOU COPY?!” ) Sometimes this is enough to get him back on task. Sometimes he’ll then say he’s struggling and needs help. Sometimes he’ll say “Mom, I reeeeeeeally don’t feel like doing this today” and that is okay because I also am not always in the mood to do something every day. The homeschool police will not arrest us if we chuck a worksheet… or a whole workbook!

Obviously I’m a very laidback parent/ person/ homeschooler. When I say my son’s time is unscheduled except for the boxes, I mean it is totally unscheduled. I put no limits on any activity. He is allowed to watch TV, play video games, listen to music, chat with his friends/grandma on Facebook, or WHATEVER as much as he wants. I am right there actively engaging him in what he does, of course, but I am very much about not controlling every waking minute of a kid’s life. I think this is why workboxing and homeschooling is so low-stress for me and my kid. We just do whatever makes us happy, and don’t do whatever doesn’t. So far, so good!

• andietweets: http://twitpic.com/w47l1 Happy New Year from our family to all of yours!!
  andietweets: Happy New Year from our family to all of yours!!
  

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Hope you all have had a wonderful holiday!

Shorty made these all by himself from scratch.

He really enjoyed squishing the dough around.

And they came out not just looking pretty, but tasting FANTASTIC!