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Home School and Loop Scheduling

How to create a loop schedule for your home school.

We are finishing up our home school year with an 8th grader, Kindergartener, and a Pre-schooler. I’ll be honest with you. We are just now finding our groove. That is one thing I love about home school, if something doesn’t work, we change it. I’m not talking about curriculum. I am talking more about scheduling, what we incorporate, what we don’t, etc. This includes loop scheduling.

So today, I want to talk a little about how we create our loop scheduling.

I heard of it sometime last year, and I thought there is no way I could pull that off. Then I read Teaching From Rest. If you are a home-school mom, I highly recommend it. This book helped change my way of thinking when it came to school and what needs to get done. Now we don’t focus so much on cramming everything in on specific days.

We focus more on one thing and then move on to the next. We take as little or as much time as the children need and then move on. I use My Father’s World curriculum for the two youngsters. The 8th grader uses Abeka. So we do use the curriculum as a guide, but I also wanted to incorporate their interests into their daily lessons. I just didn’t know how to do that without overwhelming the kiddos. Enter loop scheduling. It’s a really basic and easy type of schedule.

Every day we do a morning basket.

In the morning basket, I include a devotional, a couple of books that go along with their lessons or some of their favorites and new ones, and we also read a couple of poems together.

Right now, we are reading poems from “Where the sidewalk ends” However the other day, my 5-year-old said, “Mommy, these poems are rather silly. Can we read ones that aren’t so silly.” I agreed with her because while they make her giggle, the poems have no real depth. I am now looking for a different book of poems geared towards children.

After our morning basket, we move on to what is on our loop schedule. This is what ours look like.

Art

Cooking

Nature Study

Science

We also use the Math dictionary for our math lessons.

This is how to loop scheduling works.

We start at the top, and we do that subject. We may move on to the next subject the same day or take another day to finish our art. It doesn’t matter how long it takes us because we are not on a schedule with looping.

After we finish art, we move on to cooking the next day or later that day, whenever we want to, then nature study, then science.

We then start all over again. This is nice because, say, one of the girls has a doctor’s appointment during the week, and we only got to cooking. We can pick up nature study the day after the appointment and not feel guilty. That is because it’s a continuous loop. I plan on continuing this loop through the summer. After we tackle what is on our loop schedule, we move on to their individual curriculums. I like being able to tie in what their individual interests are.

It includes quite a bit of hands-on activities. My kindergartener is so crafty!

She especially loves art. Since I also sell Usborne Books on the side, I have incorporated their books into our loop scheduling. They are filled with hands-on activities that we all love. I also want to mention most of the kids participate in the morning basket and activities. There are six kids in my house most days, two babies, they sometimes will sit with us during the books, but for the most part, they just play alongside us.

Overall I have been very happy about our homeschooling experience this year! I cannot wait to see what the next year will bring.

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