Welcome to the new homeschool year! Today I am kicking off a brand new “Back-to-Homeschool” blog series where I will be sharing our 2023-2024 Homeschool Timetable (Charlotte Mason fancy talk for a schedule). In this blog article, I will walk through our morning lesson timetable, as well as through the afternoon. Next week I will be sharing my mother’s timetable which expands my entire day, and I will break down not just homeschool, but also where I try (imperfectly) to balance my homemaking, OCN work, morning and evening routines, mother culture, and leisure time.
The lesson timetable I’m about to walk through is for my Form 1A (3rd grade) and Kindergarten students. Because my children are still in the younger years, we keep space for plenty of play time which you’ll notice, and we only have roughly 2.5 hours of actual lesson time (for my Year 3 student). A quick note of change that I’m doing differently this year is starting a little later in the morning (by 30 minutes), including a break time, and our drill/exercise time to help break up some of our sitting/table time. When I first started mapping out our timetable, I didn’t want to add the pressure of finishing before lunch time, but as I began moving our schedule around some more, it ended up working out that we will be done with lessons by noon.
Edit to add on 3/27/2024: After many requests to make my timetable a template available to purchase, you can now find our Lesson Timetable as an editable template in the shop for download!
Disclosure: My timetable is the goal for our homeschool day, but there’s grace for when our goal isn’t met. As much as I love mapping out and planning timetables for us to follow, I am fully aware that I will never be able to create a timetable that will give us a perfectly smooth homeschool. Life happens, kids need redirection, I need redirection, and I am not operating our home education with the notion that I can systematize it, but rather, that my children are born persons, made in the image of God. Our timetable is only a tool meant to guide our days with intentional order. So friends, be encouraged when creating your own timetable that it’s not the master in your homeschool. We still have to do the work. Kids will still need to learn important skills of obedience and the habit of attention and a timetable can easily be tweaked if needed. So make your timetable, but remember to have grace for you and your children when things don’t look as it does on paper.
Our Timetable Walk Through
You’ll notice on our timetable that we homeschool 4 days, Monday through Thursday, with Friday being only part of our morning. While I like the idea of having nothing on our timetable for Friday, since we don’t have anything outside our home scheduled for that day, we’ll use our Friday mornings mostly for review and handicrafts and I prefer that it is open for when we are traveling. My husband also mostly works from home on Fridays so we might deem Friday afternoons as “dad days” where we bring him into some of our time around the table and activities afterwards.
I split up each day of the week to show my Form 1A student and also my Kinder student since the time at the table is different for each. I like have them side by side so I can see and know what each should be doing for a given time, and this has helped me rearrange our subjects in a way that I can balance my time with each child a little better. The numbers next to the subjects in parentheses are approximately the time we will spend on that subject. I know we are probably going to need to alter our plans here and there, but I feel good about how our timetable ended up for now. Another thing you’ll notice is that for the majority of our mornings, our timetable stays consistent throughout the week, with a few subjects alternating on different days. Below I will break down our timetable by my common subject scheduling terms “morning collective, daily core subjects, and weekly loop subjects”.
Morning Collective
We begin our day altogether at 8:30, covering our morning liturgies, Bible, folksong, poetry, composer, artist, and recitations. On Mondays and Tuesdays, we cover the Old Testament in our Bible readings, and then the New Testament on Wednesdays and Thursdays. (See this blog post for our curriculum picks this year)
Something I am doing differently this year in our morning collective is not doing all of the “beauty” subjects daily, but instead, I’m choosing to alternate them, still having them in our timetable 2x a week. We will still work on our recitations daily, but I’ve decided to alternate between poetry and scripture for that. Each of these subjects in our morning collective takes no more than 5-10 minutes, but this year I am allotting 20 minutes for our Bible readings so that we have time for reading our passage, narration, any commentary for that day, and notebooking (will be sharing more about our notebooking in this blog series).
Daily Core Subjects
Moving into our daily subjects, we’ll begin somewhere around 9:15-9:20. Since copywork for my Year 3 student is independent work, I will use this time with my Kinder in numbers. (See this blog post for our curriculum/resources for kindergarten).
It has worked really well for us to begin our core lessons with math and so while my kinder student is playing independently (either around us or in another room), I will work with my Year 3 student on math for 15-20 minutes. By the time our math lesson is over, we are all itching for a little break so this year I plan to have our drill/exercises right after before moving into other subjects. Our Drills/exercise time will look different everyday, but will include swedish drill, dancing, backyard games/activities, and kids workout/movement videos to follow along with.
The next subject on our timetable will be language arts, which is mostly independent work, so this will be the time I will work with my Kinder on handwriting or letters/sounds (pre-reading activities), while still being available for my Year 3. Afterwards, my Kinder student is free to play for a longer stretch of time while I read our literature/biography books, and guide a spelling lesson for my Year 3 student.
By now, we will work on either Spanish (our foreign language for this year) or practice brush drawing. My Kinder is welcome to join in on these subjects but isn’t required. I gifted him a set of his own inexpensive watercolor paints for him to use if he wants to paint with us during brush drawing. Brush drawing on Tuesdays and Thursdays is only for 10 minutes to practice, but on Fridays we may need 15-20 minutes while we work through an actual lesson.
Break Time + Weekly Loop Subjects
Around 11:00 we will take a 10 minute break where I will tidy up a tad (especially on the days we do brush drawing), and my Year 3 student will have a moment to herself. We will conclude our lessons with our weekly loop subjects (see this post for what subjects we do on a loop). Some days there will only be 1 reading in our loop, while another day there might be 2-3. Our timing for completing these will vary each week, but before noon, we will be finished up with our morning lessons and ready for a hearty lunch! Depending on when we get done, the kids will have their daily chores to do either before or after lunch, which only takes them 5-10 minutes.
Afternoons
After lunch we will move into our quiet independent time around 1:00. This is the time where I am able to get other work done (blogging, emails, product creating, content creating, home managing, etc.) and since my children don’t nap anymore, they will use this time for quiet independent activities, which I will share more details in an upcoming blog as part of this series. After about an hour or so of independent quiet time, probably 1-2x a week, I will put on a movie or tv show for them to enjoy together with a snack. While we limit screen time heavily during homeschool terms, we are not a screen-free family, and instead, are just choosing to be more intentional with turning it into a shared treat rather than a habit of background noise.
My friend Katie from Little House Learning Co. shared her thoughts on Managing Technology in The Early Years, and I found it very encouraging and insightful about this topic, if you want to read more about it!
Being a reading aloud family is important to our family culture we’re cultivating and so everyday we make time to read books that are not part of lessons, which includes for me, also! During this time, we each pick our place around the house, and for 30 minutes, we’re reading, or if you’re my kinder guy, looking at picture books independently. Last year this would be where my Year 2 student would listen to audiobooks and follow along with her free reads from the Ambleside Online Free Reads list, and it really worked well for her! She was introduced to several books she wouldn’t of read on her own choosing, so we’re going to continue this habit of Free Reads again this year (both audio/follow along and independent reading).
The rest of our afternoon is free to spend out of doors, or inside with toys and crafts. During the summer (AZ summers are well over 105+ degrees F at this time of day so we do out of door time in the early mornings or evenings when the sun is down), we may stick with indoor activities at this time until it begins to cool down, but when Autumn and Winter come, I see us spending the rest of our afternoons outside together.
This concludes our afternoon plans and our homeschool lesson timetable! As I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this blog article, I will be sharing my Mother’s Timetable which will include things like chore time, meal prepping, and home managing things alike to give you a clear overview of how I attempt (imperfectly) to balance all the hats a homeschool mother wears.
Other PARTS TO OUR HOMESCHOOL DAY
You may have noticed that I didn’t include our times on nature walks, library, and park dates. Currently, we like to hit these either before or after our bulk of lesson time. Our nature walks take place early in the morning (well before our 8:30 start time) 1x a week right now before the weather warms up too much which also allows my husband to be included before he heads to work. Ballet and kids church activities happen on the weekends so our weeks aren’t full of extra things this year which gives us more flexibility for things like hosting friends and family for dinner occasionally or evening game nights.
The principle for changing something in our timetable
Our timetable is a tool that helps me be accountable, but it is also changeable. I like to create my timetables in a google sheet so that way it’s always a working document. I don’t spend an hour creating our timetable and hoping it works out. I put considerate and intentional time and thought into how our days actually look, and find anchors in our day to build from. For example, we always begin our mornings reading the Bible aloud during breakfast, so that is an anchor for me to build our morning collective around.
If I notice something isn’t working well in our timetable, I try to evaluate the problem first before making a complete change. If the reason our timetable isn’t working out in a particular area due to the need for some habit training (either for me or my children…or both), we will continue on with it, preparing beforehand to cultivate habits needed. If we need additional time transitioning from one subject to another, or maybe a subject needs more or less preparation, I will make those changes as necessary.
Why We Use A Timetable…Where’s The Freedom In It?
Timetables may not work for every homeschool family, and not even for every homeschool family who uses the Charlotte Mason method. However, I’ve found this to be a really practical way for me to order our days in a meaningful way, and keep me accountable from dawdling or spending too much time on one thing. Having a timetable is also great for my children who can see that lessons (especially particular subjects) don’t last forever, and on a timetable like ours where we see the times listed out all the way through the afternoon, they can see that morning lessons are actually just a small portion of their day. A timetable also gives us freedom to take our chosen Charlotte Mason curriculum and make it work for our unique family rhyhtm. A timetable is not restricting, but it’s been a formative way to build and cultivate good, life long habits (time management, habit of attention, etc.). Our timetable gives us the ability to finish lessons well, and number our days in a way that is life-giving rather than feeling busy and overwhelmed with so many subjects to complete.
Having a timetable has been well worth my time, my effort and I have seen the fruit that it bears when we are diligent with it which in result, has been a gift to our homeschool days.
I hope this walk through of our 2023-2024 timetable was helpful for you! If you have questions about my timetable, please feel free to leave a comment!
Thank you so much for sharing this! Did you make your timetable in Google Docs? I am attempting to do this for myself and my Y1. I was also curious if you have another timetable with the exact reading you’re covering that week? Or do you just look at the AO schedule and do the next one on the list?
Appreciate all of your wisdom and your generosity in sharing!
Thank you for your kind comment! This was made in Google Docs! My timetable you see here is my overall general “subject” scheduling simply to give me a visual guide and make sure that we can cover all the subjects from our curriculum in one week. On Saturdays or Sundays before a new week begins I will sit down and plan out the exact readings and lesson numbers for math, etc. for the week in my homeschool planner. It was easier to only go off the AO schedule for Year 1 and 2 but for Year 3 I needed a little more structure to my planning.