Loop Planning

I am a planner, I love planning, and I love making plans. In fact I would go so far as to say that my hubby and I have a problem. We cannot even decorate a room without making a Gant chart! So I love planning, but quite often because of my shopping list of conditions the plan never works. So I spend a good chunk of time over the summer planning out our home school year, I only plan a term a head in detail (12 weeks) but even so we never seem to get through it. What happens is this I will have at least 10 or 11 days of illness, I will have anywhere between 1- 6 doctors appointments and at least 1 hospital appointment. That’s before we even take into account any field trips or children’s illnesses that might occur. What all these interruptions add up to is falling behind and don’t ask me how this happens it must be some coming together of cosmic forces or something but we always seem to fall behind in one or two subjects. It’s like Friday is my day to be ill or something. All this then equals a stressed mama as I feel that one we are very behind and two that my children are missing out on the good stuff like nature journaling, handwork etc.. 

What I have been doing for years and I mean years folks when I realise that this is happening is I evaluate the plans and rewrite them, moving subjects around, dropping subjects all in an attempt to somehow mitigate the dreaded fall behind! And let me tell you it doesn’t work, because I still get ill. So I have been in this endless conundrum for years, in times past I have convinced myself that if only we bought this curriculum or that curriculum then this would stop us from falling behind. I know better now. There is no magic curriculum that will fix it all! Instead what I discovered completely by accident was Pam Barnhill’s loop scheduling.  I had never heard of this type of planning before, but as I read more I realised that it might possibly be the answer I was looking for.

So what is loop scheduling? Well at its simplest it is the grouping together of subjects into a list that you move through from top to bottom, which you then repeat. This means that you do not assign subjects to specific days, you simply do the next thing on the list, and it removes the pressure of feeling you are falling behind in a certain subject or that you are not progressing through the curriculum because you are.  It also means that you get to all of those subjects that you never quite seem to have enough time for. According to Pam Barnhill there are a few simple rules to loop scheduling:

• Don’t put too many subjects in a loop otherwise it takes too long to repeat
• Start with one loop
• Make a procedure for each subject that is not an open and go curriculum

How does this work in practice, well for me I have 2 loops a morning basket loop and a main subject loop. Our morning basket loop takes 45 mins and contains:

• Read aloud: this usual corresponds to the period in history we are studying but not always
• Poetry memorisation
• Language Arts: English Lessons through Literature (ELTL), Handwriting
• Artist Study & Art: Traditional picture study ala CM and art instruction/project

As you can see from above I have broken some of subjects into two parts. This is to make sure that I get to all parts of that subjects as I see it, for instance we use ELTL which covers punctuation, grammar, sentence structure and dictation all I need to do to cover these is follow the lessons, however it does not cover handwriting which we also need to do. We use Handwriting Without Tears but rather than list is as a separate topic I have included it in LA. Similarly the subject of Art to me includes picture study so that my children become familiar with great art but I also want them to learn actual art skills and have the pleasure of creating, so I have put these together which we alternate through.  You can see this in the picture below:

Whilst I have assigned each subject to a day according to the rotation of the loop they are not assigned to specific days. This means that if I am ill we could still be on day 4 two weeks in. Again this does not matter as I know that my children are covering all of the subjects I want them to learn if somewhat haphazardly.  Nethertheless we are doing them!

Our main subject loop contains social studies and science. I have allocated 1.5 hours for it in total and it contains the following subjects:

• History
• Geography
• History
• Science
• Nature Studies
• Science

Now as you can see my main subject loop contains four subjects but some are repeated twice (history, Science) whilst others are just once (Nature Studies, Geography). What this means is that say I start the loop on the first day of school when we get to the main subject loop time we do history and it takes all of the 1.5 hours, the next day when we come to the Subject Loop time we do geography and a bit of history as geography only takes 1 hour. Day 3 I am ill so minimal school which involves read aloud and maths.  Day 4 I feel okay and we can do school, when it comes to the main subject loop time we finish off history and start science.  The following week on day 1, when it comes to subject loop time we finish science, etc etc…  For me loop scheduling means that on those days when I am ill it doesn’t matter so much because no single subject is assigned to a particular day, we always get to it at some point.

Obviously we might not be moving through the curriculum as fast as with regular scheduling but for me regular scheduling was not working because as I have said for whatever reason I seemed to get ill on Tuesdays for a few weeks or we always ran out of time for Science which was scheduled for Thursday and Friday, this meant that we were missing those subjects on regular basis anyway. This way no matter what happens on what day we just move to the next thing on the list when it’s time for the main subject loop!