An Update

We're more than a month in to this home learning year, and overall it's going well. I feel comfortable with the amount of time spent on the required subjects and I'm even starting to divide some of the subject work into mini-blocks.

For the first time, we have equal amounts of time spent on subjects (including music, but not PE nor biology) in the mornings and afternoons. We work from 10 -12 and again from 1 - 3, with me as a helper in the morning hours and a facilitator in the afternoon.  It looks like this:

10 - 11  Geometry (I do mine earlier so that I can help)
11 - 12  30 Minutes Music / 30 Minutes Spanish
1 - 2      Guided Lesson Work
2 - 3      30 Minutes Music / 30 Minutes Writing

PE happens in the mornings for now, along with some afternoons, but when weekday practice begin we'll drop some of the mornings.  I have no concerns regarding PE: the riders on the team who are high school are allowed to substitute regular PE with team practices so I know we are doing enough. More than enough actually as we'll add in another 3 hours of riding on top of practices each week. Right now, with practices not yet started, the boys are riding at least 10 hours per week.

Biology happens during guided lesson work and evening/weekend labs. It's another 8 - 10 hours weekly.

There are approximately 5 hours of Geometry weekly, along with 5 hours of music (plus J's weekly piano lesson). I don't count the time spent in the car listening to and discussing classical music, which is the only thing we listen to now while driving.

Spanish gets 2.5 hours weekly, plus informal practice.

We spend about 5 hours weekly on Language Arts, and about the same on Social Studies, but there is some overlap. We pull writing topics from Literature, Social Studies, and Biology.

On a day like today the boys will spend approximately 7 hours on required subjects, with a heavy emphasis on PE. Tomorrow they will spend 7.5 hours but it will be weighted toward biology as it is a lab day. Wednesday will be an easy day at 5.5 hours, Thursday 7.5 hours, and Friday 5.5 hours. I never imagined that we would spend so much time on focused learning, but that is because I keep hearing about how schools wasted so much learning time, etc. Now I'm not so sure I believe that; I find myself wishing we had more hours in the day to learn everything we want to learn.

About those mini blocks; Charlotte Mason education, at least as modeled by Ambleside Online, breaks books down into tiny chunks and the students are studying many of them at once. I'm finding that to be a good strategy for the books they don't love (although I don't think we need to be reading books they hate), but it falls apart when they do like a book. J read Pride and Prejudice in a little over a week once I assigned it even though I had planned it out over 10 weeks (T, on the other hand, is plodding through with it as assigned).

But what inspired me to experiment with mini blocks was Hamlet; the idea of stretching it out over the term (12 weeks) wasn't working for me. Instead we are giving it our full attention for the next two weeks, leaving all the other assigned reading for other mini blocks.

Blocks are what I loved about Enki and Waldorf education because I believe that we learn naturally by immersing ourselves in whatever we are interested in. I don't read the books I want to read a chapter a week - I dive in!