Scheduling supplemental subjects?

[Dudley]

I have three supplemental workbooks (Building thinking skills, Reading and reasoning, and Word Roots) that I want to schedule over 2 years. But I cant decide how to do it? Do I put each one a day or two a week? or do I start with one and just go till its done and start the next? I'm debating over continuity of doing the same thing for a while to keep the flow, or coming back to something every week could be good review that helps it stick. Maybe BTS continually and then reading and reasoning one year and word roots the next? I dont know. I have been staring at this all day

I guess part of me just wants to keep it simple and the number of books we have to manage at a minimum and my kid has to have pretty similar expectations every day/ week otherwise he gets all bent out of shape and refuses. 

How do you do it?

[2_girls_mommy]

We have a morning basket time of things that rotate that I don;t really care if they get done daily or not, but are things that I wouldn't want to get skipped entirely. So if we have a busy day, and we skip it to get the essentials done, no biggee. If we have a field trip or co-op day, then we don't do the basket time. But on our at home, no big things due today days, then we spend an hour on morning baskets rotating through things like that. I don't schedule them. 

[Lori D.]

Similar to previous poster -- we started our mornings with "together time", and rotated each week through a handful of odds and ends that didn't fit in elsewhere. Critical Thinking and Logic types of things (like your Building Thinking Skills) made a great way to start the day with a "brain warm up". We usually did a Critical Thinking sort of thing about 4x/week, taking about 10 minutes to do 1-2 pages. We also our root words program as part of our morning together time, taking about 15 minutes each on 2 mornings a week, and learning 2 roots per session -- so 4 roots per week. That gave us weeks for review, or to not worry about it if something else came up, and we still covered 100 roots in 25 of the 36 weeks of the school year, so an easy pace.

Sounds like your student really needs/wants consistency, so how about scheduling a regular morning time, and work through one whole program a few pages at a time, and when finished, start the next program and chug along through it until finished.

Another option is to make the root word study part of the daily language arts time block. Just add 5-10 minutes to what you're already doing, and learn one root a day for 4 days, and the 5th day review/practice the roots previously learned.

Edited April 20, 2019 by Lori D.

[Slache]

Personally, I find it works better if I don't schedule these things. I am a type A person and had everything scheduled down to the letter in the beginning. They go crazy about one thing and want to do it every day and don't want to do another curriculum for the next 6 months. When you pull that curriculum and out they go crazy for it. So I would do what feels right on that day. If you're adamant about finishing all three in the next two years I would count the lessons, figure out how many you have to do each school year, quarter and week and make sure you stay on track, possibly letting him pick which lessons for that day. Definitely morning time! Morning time is yay.

(My posts are usually more articulate before 11PM, sorry.)

[HomeAgain]

I just keep a subject called "extra" in our planning block.  My kid knows that's in there to do all sorts of activities: logic games/books, art, etc.  But it's there so I don't focus on the boring work and actively plan for the fun stuff, too.  Next year I have a couple of things I'll introduce.  I have 3 days a week allotted to them in the "extra" block, rotating through for the first couple of weeks to see what sticks or what needs more time with than one day a week.