There are ways, though, to cut down on all of that time. There are ways to make sure that your child gets a good education without it taking all day. I would like to suggest a few of those.

 The first way is a common one: try to keep the children together for content subjects, like geography, history, science, etc. If you have children with a large age span, you can use the same core  program (like Mystery of History, Tapestry of Grace) and add in books and activities that meet each age. This can work for all of the content subjects so that you are only doing one history, one science, etc. This can cut down on a great deal of time.

Another way is to find curriculum  that combines subjects. A really good example of this is Classical Writing. This curriculum is mainly a writing program. It leads the student  through the various writing exercises that were common in ancient times.  These exercises are called  the Progymnasmata. While CW deals with writing;   grammar, spelling, and vocab are also included in this program. It is suggested  that for Homer (the level of CW for Grades 5 and up) you do have a separate  grammar program, I wonder if that is necessary. As long as you have a good grammar reference book, I think you could get by just on the grammar supplied by this writing program. 

 The Latin Centered Curriculum offers yet other ways to save time. If you follow  LCC, you could eliminate grammar altogether by teaching latin. In learning latin, it is inevitable that grammar is included as well. With LCC, you do the basics every day, latin and math, then you schedule the other subjects once  or, sometimes, twice a week. The content subjects are taught mostly through living books  and narrations. This would cut down on a great deal of teaching time.

My last suggestion comes from my classical education e-group. Take a passage from a Great Book, be it Shakespeare or the Bible, and analyze and imitate that passage with all of your children together. You would take a passage from Shakespeare, print out a copy for everyone, then use the whiteboard  to parse and diagram  a sentence. With this passage, look for any logical fallacies or any other logic  terms. You could also look for rhetorical  figures. Your young ones would not understand all of this but I think that it is important that they are present for these kinds of discussions. The littles could use this passage for copywork or dictation.  Words from this passage could be given to the littles to put in alphabetical order  or simple parts of speech could be searched for.  I really like this idea. It takes a great deal of confidence to pull this off but  I think it would be so beneficial for all involved.

There you have it. A few ideas on how you can save time and still give a classical education to your children. 

Julia  lives on the Canadian Prairies with her 3 children (9,8,6)  attempting to give them a classical education.  You can read more  at her blog.

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