Our Daily Schedule

Finally! See, I told you having this blog was good accountability for me! I mentioned in yesterday's post that I was going to try to nail down our schedule. So, instead of frivolously wasting away nap time (although that and ice cream can do wonders for my mental health), I got productive. And it feels sooooo good to finally have this done! Below, you can see our set-up in the dining room. In one corner I have our big whiteboard with all sorts of pieces of flare, our new daily schedule, and then you see our Bible Story/Timeline Integration schedule hanging up on a clipboard.

Above is our Bible Story/Timeline Integration schedule. This, surprisingly, has been the most useful thing I've put together this year. I have this schedule hanging in the dining room, and each morning during breakfast I get down that day's 'special' timeline card. We read the back of the card and then read the corresponding Bible story. It really has been a great start to each day!

And here's our schedule. It's nothing fancy and certainly won't turn any heads, but hopefully it will keep us on track during the day. I tried a couple of different schedule options before settling on this basic one I created in Word. I bought a popular pdf homeschool lesson planner, but that just wasn't for us. Then I tried making a calendar on Google Docs, but I didn't want to have each and every little thing on the schedule. If something is on the schedule and doesn't get done, I feel like I've failed. So, to maintain my sanity, I purposefully did not do actual 'lesson plans' with page numbers of books and materials lists. Instead, here is a typical day's events: Bible Story/Timeline Card (during breakfast), Piano, Calendar Time (which now includes Geography!), Reading Lesson, Letter of the Week (writing), Snack & Read Aloud, Science or History Sentence Lapbook, and then Lunch. I didn't put everything in the world on the schedule, but just enough to hopefully guide our day (And I do realize as the girls get older this may have to change, but so far it's working for us). I'm planning to use a dry erase marker and just cross things off the list as we do them each day. As far as reviewing our CC memory work, we go over that at the table after every meal. Before Mary can be excused she has 'Review Time' where we do little quizzes. We started this last year with her AWANA verses, so she's used to it and doesn't fuss (woohoo!). You can see our memory work board set-up here.

Well, there you have it. Like I said, our schedule is pretty much no-frills, but right now it works for us. I'm exciting about having this up to help us stay on track each day! Now, let's see how long I can actually stick with it. ;)