With any full homeschool curriculum, it can feel overwhelming figuring out how to fit all the subjects in a week, let alone a day. I wish I knew about looping subjects from the get-go, so today I wanted to dedicate a blog article and answer a common question I receive often.
How do you fit all your subjects into the day?
My answer is that I loop our subjects. Allow me to explain:
The first thing I do is print off the curriculum schedule. We use Ambleside Online Year 2, and I love that all the readings are already scheduled for each week. All there is to do now is place those readings within the week that best fits into the ebb and flow of our homeschool rhythm. Here is an example of what we schedule in our loop each week.
- History
- Natural History
- Geography
- Literature
- Shakespeare
- Little Pilgrim’s Progress
- Brush Drawing
- Spanish
- Timeline & Mapwork
- Typing
- P.E.
- Handicrafts
- Nature Journaling
How do I know which subjects to include in my loop?
If a reading or lesson can be completed in a day or two, it goes into our loop schedule. I am surprised that most of our subjects can fit into a loop. Subjects like math, language arts, reading practice, and handwriting are daily lessons and we complete those 4x a week.
Morning Time Loop
I split our list of loop subjects down even further to fit into parts of our day that make sense to our schedule and rhythm. While we don’t schedule subjects for a specific day or time, I’ve found that breaking down these subjects to be done throughout the day instead of one right after the other saves us from burnout or quitting altogether. The first loop we use is a morning time loop. You can read more about our current morning time plans here. The subjects that best fit into this part of our day are
- Literature
- Shakespeare
- Little Pilgrim’s Progress
- Spanish
Each of these subjects only happens once a week normally. A Spanish lesson happens once a week, and then we practice our new phrases throughout our week together.
Weekly Loop
After we’ve completed some of our daily core lessons (math, reading, handwriting, and language arts), we have a loop subject to conclude our homeschool lesson time.
- History (1-3 readings a week)
- Natural History
- Geography
- Timeline & Mapwork
I don’t schedule these subjects on any specific day. Instead, I just go down our list of subjects each day until we’re done and then start over. Sometimes we may not finish a reading and it gets moved to the beginning of the following week or finished on Friday (we don’t typically have school leftover to do by Friday, but it happens, and the flexibility is there for emergencies).
Afternoon Loop
The bulk of our homeschool lessons may be done at this point, but there are still some subjects we’ve added to our homeschool year that are considered extras, but valuable life skills nonetheless.
- Typing
- P.E.
- Handicrafts (embroidery, baking, building, crafts, etc.)
- Brush Drawing
- Nature Journal
While most of the afternoons are free for the kids to do as they wish, these subjects are meant to fill the afternoons with hobbies and learning new skills that will (hopefully) grow with them in time and into adulthood. Our afternoon loop is meant to be a time of intentional, but casual learning while removing the temptation of being idle or reverting to a screen every time there’s downtime.
Our Afternoon loop will also always include 20-30 minutes of independent reading time and one other subject from the list above. Most of the afternoon loop time is an hour or less.
Looping our subjects has been my favorite way to include a wide feast of subjects in our home education and while it looks different for every family, this method has been working great for us this year so I thought I’d pass along how we do it. I hope this article was helpful for you! If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!
