What we do and when

I love the rich and varied subjects on offer through following a Charlotte Mason curriculum but I also know that I can honestly not do them all. I tried this last year and we sort of managed it, but not totally and then I got into all the self recrimination rubbish until Allah ( SWT) showed me that I really do not need to slavishly follow the Ambleside online curriculum, or Charlotte Mason Help, or any other curriculum for that matter, this is home edcuation, right. Not that there is anything wrong with these curriculum's, far from it they are thorough and rigorous and will no doubt provide your child with an excellent education. However, I wanted to simplify this academic year as I knew we would be moving twice, eek...  So I  decided on what would be our main goals this year both in terms of education and emotional development and which subjects we would include. I also needed longer with some of the subjects as we were definitely going over 15 minutes, so I decided to modify our timetable to accommodate this, isn't brilliant being able to do what ever you want.

Educational Goals:

• To have Nuh reading at a developmentally appropriate level by the end of the academic year.
• To complete the 3-6  Montessori maths album. (We should finish this pretty quickly and start on the 6-9 after Easter)
• To start to teach Nuh Arabic 
• To carry on with world history and not stress about staying on track with either Charlotte Mason Help or Ambleside. 
• To continue with Nature Journalling 
• To really study the continents in depth - using a combination of classical, Montessori and cm pedagogy's.
• To do artist study in our own way
• To develop good adab
• To start prophet studies again, but more in depth this time round.
• To teach Zuh how to count to twenty and recognise the symbols. Maybe the letters in her name as well.
• To have fun

Emotional development: 

• To help them prepare for the move from north lincolnshire to the west midlands
• To help them once we have moved
• To teach Zuh better conflict resolution strategies ( very fancy way of saying, stopping her whacking anyone who takes her toys, shouts at her etc..) 
• To teach them both better problem solving skills - how do we solve a conflict between each other or share a toy we both want etc..
• To teach Nuh how to play with his sister more appropriately(she does not want to play fighting all the time)

In order to accomplish these goals, I devised a timetable and selected the books and resources that we would use. Easy peasy, lol. 

If you would like a copy of the timetable click on the link below the image:

TIME TABLE

This timetable is not set in stone and I have re written it once since September, it took me a long time to move away from the rigidity of school type scheduling, I know that this looks very school like, but I do not stress if we start at 10am one day or miss artist study because we have to go somewhere after lunch. Being able to relax and use it as a guide rather than a checklist has helped us all immensely. 

Quiet time is my time. If we are in the house then after lunch we have quiet time. The kids have to leave the front room and go and play in the house somewhere, sometimes I will provide an activity like get out the play doh but not always. Anyhoo the point is that  I get to watch TV for an hour with a cuppa without them. Bliss.. 

I know that housework is scheduled on the timetable, this means that the kids have to tidy up, at 2pm. I don't care what it is, it might be a shelf in their bedroom or sorting through a toy box this again does not always happen at 2pm. Just as gardening does not always happen at 2pm, for instance this week it was more like 3pm because we had to go and buy some seeds.