This post is part of the What’s Working Right Now series, a series that attempts to give quick, practical tips for real-life homeschooling problems that can be adapted to fit in wherever it will make life easier.
The Problem: I am stuck right in the middle of a lot of homeschooling philosophies. I can’t quite get all the way to unschooler, but I’m also not really big on too much structure. I want the rigor of high academic standards, but I also want to make learning child-led whenever possible. My twice exceptional child needs some kind of order to make her life easier, but I need the flexibility to make the unpredictable schedule of being a working homeschooling mom feasible.
The result of trying to balance all these concerns? I felt like we weren’t getting enough done across an array of subjects and disciplines. If left to her own devices (child-led, am I right?) my daughter would just read fantasy novels ALL. DAY. LONG. and then draw maps of those worlds while listening to the SAME BOOK on audio. These are great activities, but they don’t represent the well-rounded education I’m aiming to provide (or, quite frankly, the legal obligations I am bound to according to state laws).
The Solution: Loop scheduling. Now, obviously, I didn’t invent this idea. There are plenty of great posts (like this one from Read-Aloud Revival* and this one from My Wild Oaks) about loop scheduling.
The concept itself is pretty simple. Instead of scheduling specific tasks on a specific day, you make a list of what you want to do and then just do it in a loop. If you only get one thing done on this day, no big deal. You’ll just start with the next thing
A lot of the loop schedules that I’d seen out there were too detailed for me. I don’t (at this point, since my oldest is only 8) need to have a specific plan for what material we will read or how long we will spend on it. I just need something that helps me remember what subject to cover next and something that helps my daughter see that yes, even if she spends some time working on word problems, she will get to read again soon.
Our loop is incredibly simple. It’s just the five core subjects (as defined by our state, so they match what I enter into my activity log) arranged in a circle. (I made it with Microsoft Word’s “Smart Art” feature. It took about a minute.) Now it hangs on our dining room whiteboard. We move a magnet around to show which task we’re on.
We’ve been doing this for about a month, and it has made a big difference. Sometimes, we spend two hours working on a single subject before moving the magnet. Sometimes, we spend 15 minutes. Sometimes, we make it all the way around the loop in a day. Sometimes the magnet only moves forward one space. Either way, I feel confident that we’ll cover everything we need to cover and my daughter gets to have the focus and guidance she needs without feeling boxed in.
Do you use a loop schedule? How detailed is it? Have you found something else that works?
*My blog and homeschooling practice is secular, but I occasionally link to sources that are not secular because I think they are valuable to the discussion at hand. In these cases, the linked post may have a passing reference to religious influence and other posts on the linked blog may be overtly religious in nature. That’s the case with this post.
