Creating Weekly Schedules for the Entire Year (A Planning Post)

We already made a blank weekly template for each student. Today, then, I’m just going to talk through how I, personally, use this to craft a weekly AmblesideOnline schedule. Obviously, there are other ways to do this. So think of this as an idea, not the Absolute Right Way. I know some of you wonder why I keep saying stuff like this, but just know that some people need to hear that. 🙂

This post isn’t going to have a lot of words. It’s mainly videos. I hope I’ve made things clear, but if not, feel free to ask questions (and share ideas!) in the comments.

I only made videos for two years — one and seven. The reason for this is because I think you will get the idea from these two, and making four videos would be totally overboard.

It’s probably most important to watch this first video, because I give a lot of background on how to plan for the whole year, which is, after all, the title of this post.

This next one is for Year Eight. Sorry the ending is so weird. I was taping while my children were gone, and they came home unexpectedly at the end!

And, yes, I did eventually figure out a couple of the mistakes you see me make in this video. 😉

Anyhow, this video is just an example of how I take a week of AmblesideOnline assignments and plug them into a template so that it all fits and is scheduled in advance. I know that some of you really wanted to see how I handled scheduling the upper years, so here you go.

One thing I want to mention is that while I do flex categories on a regular basis, this Year 8 video was extreme because I was working with a lot of introductions. If I had thought more about this in advance, I would have shown how I planned the second week, which would have been more representative of the actual way I do things. But I think this is good enough.

I can imagine some people wondering about me removing a poetry time and filling it with something else. The truth is that we also do poetry in Circle Time, so I’m not worried about removing one slot in his week on occasion — we usually do more poetry than is prescribed, if that makes sense.

I think that’s all. And now you know it took me almost half an hour to plan a single week of Year 8. Yikes, right?? Well, the good news is that the first couple weeks are the hardest, and then it goes a lot faster — at least until you begin a new term and start working with new books again.

Hope this helps!