Category Archives: Scheduling

When Life is in Chaos

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chaos [key-os]: a state of utter confusion or disorder; a total lack of organization or order.

Would you be surprised to know that while I spent the summer talking to you about your schedule, my whole world was in chaos? It was a good kind of chaos, in that there was a moving forward going on, and eventually a physical moving – to a new house. But the “new” house started out as a really old house, which had to be peeled to its bones and put back together before that move could happen. Then of course, there was the actual move, which is a hateful task. Honestly, I painted for at least 100 hours, but that was still better than the actual move from one house to the other! And the best part, (I say sarcastically,) is that I still have to paint the former house and get it ready to go on the market.

It was an amazing experience, a learning experience, for me and my kids. But after the first three months of this experience, I felt that summer break had to end. School just had to get back on track. But how?

I’m not here to tell you how I waved my wand and created four more hours in my day and a pleasant atmosphere in which to do a lovely day of school. No. I’m not that good. I’m just here to tell you some of the ways my schedule helped and some of the things I did to move forward each week.

I have my weekly schedule broken down by day, which means that Tuesday always includes Shakespeare and Thursday always includes Plutarch. Each day starts with things we do together, and ends with things the kids do separately. However, I have one severely dyslexic child, so “things they do separately” still includes me working with him. For the most part, I have to be fully involved in all four hours of their school day.

Frankly, I just didn’t have four hours each day during this crazy time, so I had to make some adjustments.

  1. Just because I didn’t have four hours to accomplish a full school day, didn’t mean I would do nothing. I knew what was on the list, so I just began working down it. Bible and hymn first, copywork next, and so on until we ran out of time for that day. The next day I picked up where we left off. Because I had organized my schedule with varying types of brain activity, I didn’t have to rethink what we were doing. Sometimes this meant that my little girls didn’t have school at all, and just read something as a free read, or packed some boxes, while my son and I did his extra hour and a half from the previous day.
  2. I knew at this rate I was going to be lucky to finish one week worth of school every two weeks, so we started back in July. As it turns out, some weeks we only accomplished one day worth of school, so we will likely need to continue on into next summer a bit. But we were always moving forward.
  3. You know I get pretty particular about doing school together, which creates community in your home, but during this time, I had to make allowances. I frequently handled house business while the kids set a timer to do copywork or read the Bible to each other. They found their folk song on YouTube and sang along, and at times, they even did dictation with each other. I’m sure moms with big families know all about this – at times you have to let one kid help another kid, because there is not enough mommy to go around.
  4. I mentioned that my son has severe dyslexia, but that doesn’t stop him from understanding the more complex books. There are options like Librivox and R.E.A.D.S. that allow him to listen to his books, or read along, but not every book is available, and very often I need to read to him. Sometimes I get around this by recording the section (on my phone or computer) before he wakes up. Then he can listen to it during the day when I’m busy.
  5. It’s a story in itself, but this same son did a huge amount of work on our remodeled house. He built stuff, which requires measuring, cutting, thinking. Like any Charlotte Mason “subject” this didn’t just fall into one category. It was math and handicraft, logic and creativity. He had to following instructions but still think for himself. It was a HUGE, fantastic learning experience for him. That can’t be disregarded.
  6. Back to those audiobooks, sometime we listened to things in the car on our way back and forth between houses. Our poet is on Librivox and so is one of our history readings. Even my Bible app will read to us. Frequently I left the house with a sticky note in hand with what school we would do on the way to the next stop.
  7. After a long day of hard work, we often sat outside of the new house and just rested. That is when we met our new neighbors. Not the people kind, (although they stopped by too,) but the rest of them. Of course, the little girls helped less on the house, so they spent hours on end inspecting the new surroundings. So nature study was happening without effort, as is usually the case if you have already established that habit in your lives.
  8. Despite all this seemingly positive forward motion, there were still times that I got discouraged. That is when I turned to one of my dear Charlotte Mason inspired friends for encouragement. Notice I didn’t just say “friend”. What we CM families are doing is something extra special, which I’m not sure can be understood by all others. I know that sounds so rotten, and exclusive, but frankly, the kind of encouragement I needed was not, “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself. Maybe the kids should go to school this year, while you get things settled.” Or, “You know, there are these DVDs you can pop in, which will teach the kids without you.” No, the encouragement I needed didn’t look anything like that.
  9. Lastly, I had to let some things go. We love our co-op friends, but I had to bow out of that commitment. I knew I could still be a member, but not attend, but then it would hang over my head. A decision I would have to make week after week. So I decided that had to be pulled from our schedule.

Maybe you aren’t renovating an old house, or moving. Maybe you have a new baby, or a sick parent. Maybe you are sick or have a child that is rebelling. Maybe you have had to take a job outside the home or it’s harvest season on your farm. I don’t have all of the answers, of course, but I would sum up in this way.

  1. Take the time to make your schedule up, then you have something to follow without that being just another decision for you to make.
  2. Be flexible. Sometimes the ideal is just not attainable.
  3. However keep moving forward with school. Don’t give up.
  4. Know that this is just for now, so live where you are. Enjoy that infant or those distracting toddlers, sit with your sick parent, put your whole heart into that rebelling teen. You will not get this time back.
  5. Enjoy the people in your life even if you all seem to be on edge and angling for a fight. Make time for the fun things you all enjoy.
  6. Make time to notice and enjoy the beautiful nature God gave you. It’s a gift. Don’t ignore it.
  7. Start each day with some standard routines no matter what. You don’t have a full day to “catch up”, so you need to “keep up” with some of the basics. You decide what those basics are.
  8. Get plenty of sleep at night. Don’t burn the midnight-oil and then be a grump the next day. Stress makes us more short tempered anyway, but add lack of sleep to that, and you have a bad combination.

Blessings. It’s all blessings. I love my new house, and it looks like this week we will finish a full, complete week of school inside of 5 days. We will get back to normal at some point, or find a new normal.

One of our new neighbors. We noticed eggs one day and then the next day there were babies! We were able to watch their progress every single day until they finally took off on their own.

 

Can you believe this silly neighbor?! Unfortunately this little guy didn’t make it. He disappeared long before he should have been able to make it on his own.

 

My son learned how to use many tools and one day he used them to make each of the kids a bird house.

 

Whenever we had a day at home, I packed. I had boxes and boxes of books. Cocoa says, “Don’t forget to take me.” That green stuff on top of the boxes is moss my girls collected. If you have never studied moss, don’t put it off. It’s so cool!
My brother in law was point-man on the whole project and he would say to my son things like, “Hey, build your parents a closet.” If things didn’t go well, he would just help my son take it down and start over. He was so good at letting him try things.
Lots of calculations.

 

A little nature study going on…and a little freaking out on mom and dad’s part. We had no running water yet, or soap, and ya’all know some of those cool mush are poisonous! She lived.

 

This is a sunrise, people, not a sunset. Just saying. 😀

 

Memorizing Together

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Memorization is something we used to do separately. Everyone would pick a poem or Bible section based on their preference, and each day they worked on it for a few minutes, even reciting a portion of it to me to prove that they had made some effort. Each month they recited what they had memorized in front of our co-op. There was mixed success with this. Some of the kids were more successful than others, and some found it to be torture!

When I decided to combine as much as I could, this seemed like an obvious choice. We had never attempted to memorize “Charlotte Mason’s way” before, but this seemed like a good time to try.

The basic outline is that you just read the poem or whatever passage is to be memorized daily to the child(ren). You don’t ask them to repeat back lines, or practice sections, and it’s best to do it when they are unconscious to learning it, and can just enjoy the reading. Eventually, they just know it.

“The gains of such a method of learning are, that the edge of the child’s enjoyment is not taken off by weariful verse by verse repetitions, and, also, that the habit of making mental images is unconsciously formed.” -vol 1 pg 225

Charlotte Mason tells a story about a woman who read to herself during a period of convalescing, and ended up memorizing large passages of the book she was reading. However, she said that after getting back to her regular routine, she couldn’t do it anymore. The busyness of life, and hence the busyness in her mind, inhibited her from being able to do it. Which made me realize that I needed to do this with the kids, instead of sending them off with instructions to do it themselves.

I chose a poem that I thought they would all enjoy, Among the Stars by William Wordsworth, from The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry. (Among the Stars is actually part of the prologue to The Poem of Peter Bell.) I wanted something that used simple English, and that allowed for many mental images. I also wanted a long poem, but I really didn’t expect them to learn the whole thing. I just wanted them to have the opportunity to surprise themselves if it turned out that this way worked as well as it was supposed to.

At first they complained that they could never memorize such a long poem! But I explained that we had no deadline, no specific goal. We would just read it daily and see where we got. This wasn’t a test. We took it in sections, because it was a rather long poem, and I would read it to them twice. Charlotte Mason does not say to do that, but I felt like I should. Some of my kids were well into high school at this point, and their minds were closed off to memorizing. Furthermore, I allowed them to quietly say it with me during the second reading if they wanted to.

Here is a video that I took of them repeating the poem before their friends. They would be so embarrassed for me to share that, but I’m just so proud. It just goes to show – Charlotte Mason knows what she is talking about! We just need to trust her and move forward.

“Let the child lie fallow till he is six, and then, in this matter of memorising, as in others, attempt only a little, and let the poems the child learns be simple and within the range of his own thought and imagination. At the same time, when there is so much noble poetry within a child’s compass, the pity of it, that he should be allowed to learn twaddle!” – vol 1 pg 226

If you pay attention to this quote you will see that I shouldn’t have started with the long poem. They were not little kids, but I believe that with most things Charlotte Mason, you should start at the beginning and work up, no matter how old they are when you begin the method. I don’t always do things just right the first time, but I continue to improve my knowledge year after year.

This year my plan is to do more small poems, rather than long ones. The long ones are great, because they challenge them and really build confidence, but since we haven’t been doing this for years, I feel like they have missed out on storing up several small poems as their own. (Because even the small poems were slowly and laboriously learned before we started doing it this way.) We will still learn full Psalms, so those will be our longer challenging sections.

In the long run, I foresee the possibility of everyone working silently around the table on their own selections, but I don’t see that as the “correct way” and the rest as just a compromise. After all, in the PNEU school there was a time period for memorization, and the Programmes specify what was to be memorized. We don’t know that they learned it aloud as a group, but it seems the most realistic possibility to me.

Thank you to Julie Z. for prompting this post! I hope it helps.

Recalibrate Your Morning Routine

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I always use summer and Christmas break to “recalibrate” my morning routine. You see, things change from time to time, and habits fall behind. A period of sickness will make me give up everything but the necessities during the mornings before school, and we all know that the habits we are talking about here can be broke in a few short days.

They say it takes 30 days to create a habit, but let’s face it, I can lose the habit of exercise in just a couple of days. Then I have to put in the 30 days all over again! So summer and Christmas break is when I do this.

Another important aspect of recalibrating my morning is figuring out when I need to start. For instance, if I want to start school at 9:00, and my morning routine takes 3 hours, then I must get up by 6:00. Periods of time with no 9:00 finishing line help me figure out how long my morning routine takes without additional stress.

First, I consider my wish list – what I want to get done in the morning. For me this list includes:

  • Quiet time (Bible and tea)
  • Exercise
  • Meals (breakfast, some dinner prep)
  • Pick up (my room and bathroom)
  • Laundry (a load or two)
  • Possibly a project (changing the kombucha, writing a blog, etc.)

Then I work out the best order to do all of this. I know exercise has to come early in my list, because if I work on a project, time will likely get away from me, and I won’t get time to exercise. On that same note, most projects have to be done last in my routine. It’s also much easier to exercise before the kids wake up and start vying for my attention.  After I exercise my feet move faster, so I find that’s a good time to do moving items on my list. For that same reason, sitting down to read my Bible or drink hot tea doesn’t work after exercise, so I plan to do it before. Also, my house is two-story, and I don’t want to go up and down stairs a lot, so I plan around that. In the end I find a pattern that works for me, and then I do it in that order every day.

“If you don’t plan out your behaviors, then you rely on your willpower and motivation to inspire you to act. But if you do plan out when and where you are going to perform a new behavior, your goal has a time and a space to live in the real world. This shift in perspective allows your environment to act as a cue for your new behavior.” -James Clear, jamesclear.com, author of the free guide Transform Your Habits

So, my routine becomes:

Upstairs –

  • Make my bed, put on shoes (I exercise in my pjs), and grab the dirty clothes pile

Downstairs –

  • Sort the clothes, start a load of laundry and fold what is in the dryer
  • Clean litter box (which is in the laundry room)
  • Make tea and read my Bible while enjoying a cup
  • Do 30 minutes of exercise (treadmill is in the laundry room)
  • Move now completed laundry to dryer, and fold what I removed (because I’m still in the laundry room)
  • Check calendar (so I can consider the best dinner plan and how I will dress)
  • Possibly start dinner or do some prep (at the least have a plan)
  • Make breakfast (wake up the kids)

Back upstairs – (take folded laundry with me)

  • Put laundry away
  • Shower and dress for the day
  • Wipe down my bathroom and head back downstairs

Back downstairs –

  • Work on a project if there is time

If I do this routine day after day and note how long it takes, then I know how early I need to get up in the morning to be done by a certain time. For a while, my morning routine wishlist meant that I would have to get up by 5:00! That was just too early for me, so I had to cut some things down. For instance, instead of exercising for an hour, I had to figure out how to exercise smarter for 30 minutes. Instead of participating in a Bible study that required 30-45 minutes to complete each morning, I just needed to read a chapter on my own. Instead of completing two loads of laundry, I needed to just get one done.

My list above works for me. I can complete it in two hours if I stay focused. By doing it in order, I don’t have to think about it. Which means it requires less will power.

Here’s the best part – as I begin my day, the part that begins after my morning routine, I have a bunch of accomplishments under my belt. I am already having a successful day! I have exercised! I have completed two loads laundry and they are put away! I have started my day with quiet time before the Lord! I’ve had a little “me” time before the kids have awakened. I am dressed and ready to go wherever I need to. I have a plan for dinner, if not an actual dinner started. I feel successfully and it’s only 9:00 am!

Think about using these last couple of weeks of summer to recalibrate your morning. (And think about me as I prepare to move to a house with no laundry room! My whole routine will have to change.)

Related:
Good Morning Sunshine!
Summer is a Good Time to Practice
A Mom’s Habit of Attention