The Rhythm of Planning Your Homeschool Year

There is an old saying that says if you aim at nothing, you will certainly hit it. I used to think that sounded boring, that if you always planned out what you would do and what you were aiming for, you might miss some essence of becoming that comes from being able to live in the moment and take a new path at any given time.

Now, I recognize that aiming for something means you can amble towards a destination, but still stop and smell the flowers (or even take a new path) on the way. One of the big obstacles to living life intentionally is thinking that things will just fall into place and that you will have the energy and inertia to make your intentions into a reality. I have found, that for me, too much of daily life comes at me and before you know it, I am living in a hurried state and have wandered into the busy-ness of things and have left my true intentions behind me.

Thus the need for planning. I am living a rhythm of planning right now. I marked off the last two weeks of June and the entire month of July as my planning season. This doesn't mean that I sit around planning all day, instead it means that I have slowed the calendar down for my family. We are not accepting as many play dates and activities right now. The children are still down for summer camp for a week in July, but we are careful to keep our interactions down to one or two things a week for the rest of the time.

I use this time to read and to think and to make notes. For the last several weeks, I have read ebooks on Waldorf education, listened to audio files and videos of lectures and conferences, and have surfed the internet for inspirational blogs and photos of the main lessons, daily rhythm, and age and stages that this year holds for me. I have also been doing some reading on the temperaments and how they relate to adult/child interactions. I haven't crammed the information, but have bitten off bite size pieces. I read and then make a few notes. Then I sleep on it. The next day, I may read my notes again and think about how to incorporate this into my life this year.
After a couple of weeks of mulching like this, I took out my calendar and wrote in all of the solid dates for the fall. I wrote in appointments, meetings, festivals and celebrations, etc.

Next, I have started looking up the main lesson topics in my library catalog and making a list of resources for each topic. I have also taken note of resources I already own and purchased a few things. 

Now I am ready to move to the next stage. I plan to spend the next couple of weeks planning out my main lessons and putting it all into my planner. I will still allow myself room to roam a bit, but I have found that in order to make my house and school run smoothly and keep the intentionality to our days, we need some planning and we need rhythm.

Finding Rhythm in the Home

It is June and my thoughts and energies turn to planning a new school year. It is time to think about the year ahead and what it will hold for our homeschool. I turn forty this year and while that may not seem to have anything to do with our household rhythm, stay with me for a moment. As I count down my last months of being in my thirties, I realize that turning forty has many things to recommend it. For one thing, I am more confident in my own body. Not in the physical sense so much as in the mental sense. I feel that I have reached a place that I can move ahead without as much second guessing myself. I have struggled to find a philosophy of education that I could embrace and that meshed with my beliefs and values. We have been very eclectic in our approach. I think this is a good thing. It has made the journey interesting and instructive, both in what works for us, and what definitely does not.

 

Thus, I embrace the Waldorf philosophy of rhythm instead of routine. Rhythm breathes and has a gentle boundary line. Routine is more strict and has less warmth to it. If rhythm is playdough, then routine is wooden blocks that must be stacked just so.  My children are not babies anymore, they have crossed the rainbow bridge into true childhood and are poised at adolescence. Does rhythm still have a place in our home? 

 

Last year we had a "breathing out" kind of pace. We attended a weekly cooperative with academic classes, participated in community theatre, and generally found ourselves out and about. It was fun and it was educational and it was tiring. Even though the children are now 13 and 9, they both agree with my husband and myself that it is time for a "breathing in" year.

 

I prepare for our new school year by first seeking out a new rhythm. I will no longer have access to a washer and dryer this year (starting this week), so laundry day will become more interesting. I must scout out the best laundry facility in the area for our weekly sojourn. With all of the food allergies here (gluten, sesame and other seeds, peanuts, tree nuts, and dairy), we need to find more time to bake and prepare things that will make life easier. The children and I all love to sew, so that could also be a place we need to schedule time. I am also tossing around the main lesson ideas, the Montessori materials, the math and Old Testament stories and the extra lessons in reading that I need to organize for my third grade son. My daughter, who is in middle school, is going to plan her own course this year. She is going to study Physical Science and Pre-Algebra. She is working on making up her own literature list, planning to research starting a small business and an Etsy site, and is also working on writing a novel. We have met a couple of times already and I am excited about her ideas for volunteering, community involvement, and the special projects she is planning.  I have really put in the blood, sweat, and tears on how we should do the upper middle and high years. There seems to be so much pressure locally to move into a more traditional and/or classical approach in these years. But, I see her blossoming and unfolding into such an amazing person. She has asked us for more unstructured time and for our blessing to seek out some of her own dreams this year instead of being busy in weekly out of the home classes - and isn't that what homeschool is all about? So we move forward and feel our way into the teenage years, but even so, there is rhythm.

 

I envision our week including a baking/cooking day, a laundry day, a sewing and mending day, a painting and/or art project day, an errand day, and a day of rest and contemplation. This leaves one day free. We will either make that a free day (so the other days can breath a bit), make it a visiting day, an extra study day, or a day of poetry and verse (complete with a poet's tea and poems read aloud). Of course, at least five of these days will also function as school days. This is our weekly rhythm, but our daily rhythm will be a bit more specific. I hope to journal here how we shape our daily rhythm and how it all comes together.

 

Happy Summertime,

Laura