It’s been a while since we’ve used Loop Scheduling in our homeschool but something needed to change as these kids have been dragging school on and on EVERY SINGLE DAY and it feels like I can’t get anything done. I decided to try a Loop Schedule so that we can FOCUS on the things that need to get completed as we are currently on WEEK 32 of our 2023-2024 school year and not close to being where we need to be to get FINISHED. <insert sad face>

I have previously used a whiteboard or just a printout for our loop schedule. We would have a magnet or a sticky tab to move down the list to help me keep track of where we are but this time I’m doing a printed schedule so that I can fill in where we are and what we did… hoping this will help me keep track of the lessons a little bit better.

I plan to use this information to add to our Homeschool Manager app in a reverse scheduling fashion. I have a lot of the lessons planned but I won’t add them to the schedule until after we have completed them… maybe this will help me stop feeling like we are BEHIND. Life has been CHAOTIC for the past couple of weeks with some unexpected dental appointments, the hot water heater quit working, and then the dishwasher bit the dust when the kids were using it… that is part of LIFE when you give kids chores and responsibilities as they sometimes don’t pay attention to what they are doing, especially when they are in a hurry and want to go play. The consequence is that now all the dishes will have to be washed by hand for a while… <insert multiple sad faces here>

Anyway, the kids and their teeth are all OK and I was able to get appointments scheduled for everyone… this has been quite the task since COVID and all. The hot water heater has been fixed thanks to MR. Awesome and his buddy. The dishwasher is still broken but it still works great as an oversized dish drainer.

The one thing that hasn’t been remedied is the fact that we have a lot of school work that we still need to get through… maybe I was a little ambitious in our goals for the year? I included a lot of things that the kids had asked for and a few things that they really needed as two of the girls are on high school level for some things… one of them is special needs and she is behind a bit but working towards the goal of graduating in the next couple of years. I was trying to let them be a bit more independent in their studies but that has backfired on me when I realized they were just rushing through math lessons and not understanding what they were doing so now we’ve had to backtrack to mid-year and start over again.

This problem led me to the decision to go back to a Loop Schedule for now. We will be focusing on our main subjects like Reading and Math, then Science, History, and Geography. After those will come our other subjects like Grammar, Literature, Home Economics, PE/Health, Spanish, and Art & Music as they have already completed enough lessons in these subjects for the school year. I’ve also sprinkled some FREE CHOICE fun things in the mix to help keep them motivated.

I love that Loop Scheduling helps to reduce stress as it doesn’t require you to schedule any particular subject or lesson for any set day. You can rotate through the subjects in your time as your schedule allows. No more writing lessons in my planner only to cover them with whiteout or scribble a million notes because something didn’t go as planned. No more stressing because we are further behind on our studies than where I had predicted that we would be. I just note down what we did as we do it and it makes life so much easier!

Having a rough day and someone is stuck on math? That’s ok because you can just skip the other loops for the day and focus on math.

Did everyone catch a stomach bug and nobody feels like doing school? That’s ok because you can just pick up wherever you left off when everyone feels better.

Is everything going really smoothly and getting finished up quicker than usual? That’s great! You can choose when to stop or you can keep working through the schedule.

This new schedule is working out pretty well so far and it still allows them the freedom to work ahead on some of the subjects… I am working one-on-one with the girls right now to make sure that they understand their math though.

If we have a rough day and can’t do a lot then that’s OK because we can just pick the next day and work from there. By rotating through the subjects we are making sure that everything is getting covered regularly but it also gives us more time to focus on the core subjects that they really need to get finished up. Our schedule looks a little complicated as we have a lot of kids in different levels that I need to keep track of but it works for us.

In the example below you will see that this was a good week and we were actually able to restart some of the loops so that the next week we started a little further down the list. We could have stopped once we got through but these subjects were finishing up so they didn’t have much left on them to do. There were also a couple of days when we skipped reading or math because we were doing it in another area. The girls got stuck on math so we just stayed on the same lesson until they understood it well.

Here is a sample of one of our weekly schedules:

Here is a blank schedule if you would like to try this for your school… this actually works well for many areas – even house cleaning! I try to print them front and back so I have less to keep up with! The larger spaces can be used to write in whatever lessons or subjects you covered during that rotation. This can then be hole-punched and placed in your binder for record keeping.

Here’s an updated version:

Here is the daily version that I am trying out too… it helps to have my daily lists right in front of me so I don’t get so side-tracked! I only need to print one of the second page and then a few of the first page so I can keep track of the week’s lessons... no need for a planner as I can just keep these to show what we’ve completed for the year!

I hope this helps someone… I know it’ll help me if I need to find this again in the future!

God bless!