Troubleshooting Your Charlotte Mason Daily Schedule
What if you poured out all your time and energy to create the perfect CM daily schedule, and then you end up struggling to finish each day’s lesson? That can feel really frustrating!
In this post, we hope to continue our troubleshooting series to help you implement the CM method well in your home.
Questions to Check Your Charlotte Mason Daily Schedule
Because each family is different, I will not claim to have the answers, and instead will try to ask you guiding questions to help you pinpoint what could be causing the struggle.
1. What time do you normally start school lessons?
Each family is different, so it’s important to think about the actual time you spend doing lessons. Are you early risers or night owls? If you start the day late (which is fine if that’s the only way it can work in your family), it’s totally understandable that the school day may stretch on longer than you would like.
A typical CM school day during Miss Mason’s time usually started around 7 in the morning and ended around lunchtime for the younger forms, and around 1PM for high school-age students. This already includes the riches, while the afternoons are given to things like outdoor time, nature study, handicraft, musical instruments, and the child’s other interests. Consider this more as a guide or ideal but it doesn’t have to be strictly followed, as we understand that each family has distinct needs during specific seasons in life.
2. How many hours are you allotting for school work?
This is very much related to the first question. Many of us, especially coming from traditional school systems, expect the school day to run for 6 to 8 hours at a time. In reality, in homeschooling, the school hours can go much shorter, simply because the child is given one-on-one attention and he is also expected, especially in a CM homeschool, to give his full attention. A CM school day for Form 1 can be done in as fast as 3 hours, and Form 2 can go for 3 to 4 hours. Form 3 can go longer, at about 5 to 6 hours.
If you scheduled a full day’s worth of work, from 7AM to 4PM, then it’s possible that the school day can stretch on even towards dinner time, especially when you get a late start. Take a look at your scheduling and see if you can tweak it to have a shorter total time. In CM, short lessons are a must, but we don’t sacrifice quality because the students are expected to give their focused attention, which means that they learn as much as they can from the limited time; but we also emphasize lots of free time for them to ruminate on what they’ve read, and to be free to explore other interests.
3. How much break time do the children get?
Do you schedule breaks into your day? In some families, having set breaks can help make lessons go faster, because the children are looking forward to the breaks. In others, the break times can go on indefinitely and make it harder to get the children back to their lessons! You will have to figure out what works best for your family!
4. Are you using a set curriculum or did you make your own?
If you are using a set curriculum, whoever created it would already have taken into consideration the length of each day’s lessons, but there are still variables in place, such as how fast you and/or your child can read, which can still affect lesson length.
If you made your own curriculum, it’s possible that you may have scheduled too much for a reasonable school day length.
In either case, one way you can check is by timing each lesson time to see how long it takes to finish with the child paying focused attention. Ideally, students in Form 1 can finish each lesson in 15 minutes, about 30 minutes for Form 2, and up to 45 minutes for Form 3. If you find that an assigned reading takes so much longer than the ideal, consider breaking it up into two separate readings.
If you want to take a look at a sample daily schedule, you can download the FREE SAMPLE to our Charlotte Mason International Curriculum, an open-and-go guide with one year’s worth of lessons.
5. Are both you and your child giving your full attention to the lessons?
Anything less than full attention can make a lesson drag on so much longer than it should. We believe this applies for your child, but it can also be affected by your own focus, depending on how much you are involved.
For example, for a child with whom you are still reading aloud or doing shared reading, when either of you is distracted, it can result in not being able to concentrate, which makes the narration time a stressful experience. This can then result in you being tempted (or even giving in!) to lecturing, which not only eats up precious time, but also causes stress for both of you, making subsequent lessons harder to do.
For things like copywork, complete attention is also necessary. If your child is working on it and you’re busy working on something else (which is common for working moms, and I tend to do it too!) we may not be able to catch on right away when there’s a wrong spelling. We may also not notice when our child is dawdling!
I’ve found in my own experience as a working mom that lessons go much faster if I dedicate the school time fully to school lessons and do my own work when school lessons are done, instead of multi-tasking! But of course each family may be different, so check and see what works best for you.
Troubleshooting Your Daily Schedule in a CM Homeschool
We hope this post has helped you find the weak areas that you can improve in your daily schedule! If you still need to see a sample guide of what we’ve tested and found to be a manageable amount of work, check out our Charlotte Mason International Curriculum. You may download a FREE SAMPLE at our Shop Page by clicking the item and scrolling down to the Description past the Paypal button. Hope that helps!
