We finished our seventh week of school last week, and it has been the best year in...well, years.
One thing that has made a big difference has been our forced pruning. I'm a devoted gardener; I know that when I ruthlessly prune, the best blooms follow. My roses thrive when I prune them hard twice a season. My azaleas bloom prolifically after a good post-bloom spring pruning. And deadheading, too, revives and encourages better blooms. My roses and butterfly bush can tell you that!
{Rose season is almost done--I've got the year's last blooms on the bush now.}
This year I had to turn the pruning to our schedule and our lives, and I had to make hard decisions about what to keep and what could go. It was the best thing I could've done, and what's interesting is that no one is missing the activities we had to cut out.
The other thing that has helped me significantly has been using a "timetable," or schedule, for our schoolwork.
The first few weeks of school I tried to follow a general routine: morning time together, table work, then reading independent books. We've done this for years. But after a few weeks, I became frustrated because Finn's school day felt like it was stretching to dinnertime every single day. Sure, he's in 8th grade, but come on! It felt like too much to me, and he also longed for more free time. After taking a long time to do just a few subjects, he'd have literature to read at 4pm or science to do while I made dinner. The biggest issue is that Finn is a person who dives into something deeply, and he's a neat, perfectionistic, diligent person, so one math lesson that involves drawing several graphs will take an hour and a half (I'm not even kidding), and result in--yes--the best, most gorgeous hand-drawn graphs you've ever seen.
I love this about Finn! But I believes he needs to do more than just math, piano, and foreign languages, with the occasional grammar lesson squeezed into the mix. And--most importantly--I feel he needs to have a wide swath of time most afternoons to be outdoors, or playing with his sister, or studying more languages (yes, it always happens), or making things...whatever he wants. I want him to have that "masterly inactivity" that is one of the primary benefits of homeschooling.
{Alice the Cat needs no timetable to achieve peace in her life.}
So I revisited the Charlotte Mason timetables, and decided to assign times to each subject. Rather than doing one math lesson a day, he just does 45 minutes of math. Rather than taking two hours to obsess over Spanish, he can do 45 minutes, then revisit it later in the day if he still wants to do more (he often does!). Finn was shocked: when we instituted this and stuck with it, his school day went from being roughly 9 am until close to dinnertime, to being 8:30ish to 1:00! And we get everything done. And he has all afternoon most days to do whatever else he wants.
We've used the timetable approach for about 3-4 weeks now, and we're thrilled with the result. Yes, he'll go through his math curriculum more slowly. No, we don't care (I checked in with the resident engineer to also make sure he was okay with that, and he said he prefers it!). There are days when I'll allow him to have a bit of extra time to finish up a subject. I also tried to "over-budget" time for some things, like languages, because he does prefer to linger over them. Even so, we're done with school by 1:00 most days, and if he's not done then, he only has a small amount left to do in the afternoon. Since Annie is easily done before lunchtime, my afternoons are freer now, too.
With just a little bit of discipline and thoughtfulness, I feel so much more peace now!
Now I'm thinking of timetables (isn't that a better word than "schedule?" I think so...) as I ponder other aspects of life that may be improved by a little more time-structure. Stay tuned.....
{Russian sage, a perennial favorite, which goes strong all summer and lingers into autumn.}
No comments:
Post a Comment