A Day in the Life: Block it Out

Block scheduling has been very helpful since I found I was losing my son in the transitions between subjects (and I do mean “losing”—he would literally vanish, and we would lose valuable time while I discovered which distraction had beamed him away while he was supposed to be getting out the next materials). It is more difficult to block schedule some upper elementary/middle school subjects because of their “density.” As a result, my son has gone back to a more traditional OLS schedule, which delivers math and language arts first. Unfortunately, he doesn’t always get through it all, and the subjects which are listed lower on the list can get skipped. Our solution is to have “upside-down” days once or twice a week (usually we do this on Tuesday and Thursday) in which we start at the bottom and work our way up. He seems to enjoy the novelty of this, and we do more than one lesson if needed to catch up.

If we have fallen behind in any of the subjects, we plan a day devoted to “fun” and make an event of it—making tea or hot chocolate and sitting by the fire to read, or pulling out stuffed animals or costumes and props that go along with what we are studying. Right now my family room is covered with bones—my son is playing with every human body and skeleton model and kit that we’ve accumulated over the years—as well as all of the characters from Winnie-the-Pooh. Trust me, it is quite a sight!

We do modified block scheduling a week at a time to help my children feel more in control and responsible. They get to choose the order in which to work the subjects and have a better understanding of what type of work their brains are ready for on that day or moment. So they do all subjects in a week, but choose the order.

I give them a list for a week at a time. Both of my children like to work on a subject all at once to stay focused on topics, so we try to group things within a unit that go together in a week, rather than going into the next lesson and having to refer back to a book they read. We try to split some units of math, history, and science evenly out over a week, two, or three.
 
The advantages to us are that my children feel more in control and responsible for their learning and understanding of their brains and bodies. It also helps them stick to one topic and be able to reinforce it rather than waiting until the next week to remember the concepts. My fifth grader mostly likes to do math all at once because she says doing it over and over reinforces it and keeps it fresh in her brain. They are also learning their points of overload and when to stop and carry it on into another day.

Since I have so many different science levels to teach, I've found it helpful and more fun to set up a "Science Camp" where I choose a unit from one of the levels and spend a "blocked" amount of time going through all of the lessons and setting up all of the experiments from that unit as a family. The siblings have fun sitting in on each other's camps when time permits.

The camp can be a weeklong adventure (combined with other courses throughout the day) or it can be the ONLY thing we do for two to three days (with no other courses in the mix). We have found that, typically, when we do Science “camp-style,” we go through the unit faster and have lots of fun in the process.