How to Set Up Your Homeschool Schedule (Part 3 of 4) – Independent Work / Table Time Block!

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Need some tips on scheduling your children’s independent or table time work?

In Part 2 of this series, I covered how to schedule your Together School Block. Today we will be covering how to schedule the Independent Work / Table Time Block! Ready? Let’s go!

Schedule the Independent Work / Table Time Block

This time block is going to be used for all the subjects that your child needs to work on either independently or with mom. You will include things like: phonics, reading, language arts, math, penmanship, etc. So let’s get into the nitty gritty of planning out this block of time!

Take one child at a time and figure out what subjects they need to work on during this time block.

The first step in scheduling this time block is to make a list of what each child needs to work on. So get out a piece of paper (or type a list on your computer), and jot down all the subjects each of your children need to cover the coming year. Look at where each child is in their learning process and select the subjects that are specific to their needs.

Then figure out what curriculum you are going to be using for each of those subjects. Add that information to your list as well.

Once you have that done, you are ready to move on to the next step!

Decide how many days a week you will have them work on each subject.

In order not to overwhelm younger children especially, you may need to spread the subjects out over the week. For example, they may do math and phonics every day, but then do language arts three days a week, and penmanship two days a week.

So take a look at the subjects that each of your children need to work on and figure out what they will do each day of the week.

Divide up the material and make a note of how much they need to cover each day.

The next step is going to take some figuring, so get those brains working! You will need to do this for each of your children. Look at the material that they will be covering, and the number of days a week they will be working on that subject.

Figure out the total number of lessons/pages they need to complete for the subject.
Figure out the total number of days they will be working on that subject during the whole school year.
Divide the number of lessons by the number of days. (For example, if there are 120 pages to be done in their language arts workbook, and you figure they will be working on language arts 3 days a week that would be 108 days during the school year (3×36 weeks). To figure out about how many pages they need to complete each day, do the following (120 pages divided by 108 days = about 1.1 pages per day. So that means that you will want to schedule at least 1 page a day and sometimes 2.

Once you have that figure (how many lessons/pages they need to complete per day), then record that next to the subject on your list.

Do this same procedure for each of the subjects for each child. When you are done, you will have all the information you need to move to the next step!

Chart out the daily work on a calendar for each child, but only schedule out the first 6 or so weeks of school.

Now you are ready to begin actually scheduling out your child’s homeschool work during this time block. I don’t know what you use to do your lesson planning, but I like to purchase an Intentional Monthly Planner for each of my children. I use that planner to record their daily assignments on. It has worked great because I can easily see what each child needs to work on and they can check it off as they complete them. (Click here if you want more details how I plan using the Intentional Monthly Planner, especially my tips for using it with older children!)

You can also just use a spiral notebook. Simply write the date and then the assignments underneath. You will probably have room to get a whole week’s assignments on the front and back of a page.

So what you will do is look at your list you made in the previous step and jot down on each day what your child will be doing. For example, this is what one week may look like:

Monday
Math – Lesson 1
Phonics – Lesson 1
Language Arts – Page 1

Tuesday
Math – Lesson 2
Phonics – Lesson 2
Penmanship – Lesson 1

Wednesday
Math – Lesson 3
Phonics – Lesson 3
Language Arts – Pages 2-3

Thursday
Math – Lesson 4
Phonics – Lesson 4
Penmanship – Lesson 2

Friday
Math – Lesson 5
Phonics – Lesson 5
Language Arts – Pages 4

I want to encourage you, though, to not go overboard on scheduling out your child’s work. I would highly recommend that you only schedule the first 6-7 weeks of school. That way you will be able to determine if you scheduled too much or too little and adjust when you plan out the next interval of your homeschool.

I hope you can see how beneficial this can be scheduling out each of your children’s table time work ahead of time. It takes so much stress off of you when it is all planned out!

In the next post we will move on to scheduling the Read-Aloud Time & Free Time Blocks!