I realized a couple of months ago that I would be adding a 3rd child this year to our homeschooling schedule.  Although, I do not find myself freaking out quite as much as I did when I added number 2, I am finding that it will throw a wrench in the works.  Couple that with the fact that I now have a 5th grader and something about having a 5th grader makes me feel as though I need to step up his standards, I am finding that I must rework much of our school day to accomodate all I wish to accomplish. 

I will not even attempt to lead you to believe that I know everything there is to know about creating a school schedule, but I did think it might be helpful to give you a tiny taste of what sorts of questions and planning is going into the creation of our new school schedule.

The first thing I did was write out every subject I wished to cover w/ every child.  My youngest will be doing an all-inclusive curriculum called Home Education Curriculum (which is out of print).  The main challenge here will be finding the one-on-one time to do this w/ her.  It will only take about an hour, but we all know how elusive an entire in-tact hour can be in a homeschool mom's day.

With my 5th grader, I intend to do Bible, Math, Grammar, History, Science, Rosetta Stone, Spelling, Art, & Music Appreciation.  Up to this point, we have only been consistant with Bible, Math, History, & Science, so adding 2 new and rather rigorous subjects (Spelling & Grammar) is going to be the biggest challenge here.

With my 2nd grader, I intend to do Bible, Math, Handwriting, Grammar, History, Science, Art, & Music Appreciation.  The challenge here will be to add the Grammar and to make a more concerted effort to really help her to understand math...not just tolerate it.  (Actually, we would be leaps and bounds ahead if she would just learn to tolerate it!)

From here, I wrote out how many days per week each of these sujects required.

Bible ~ 5

Math ~ 5

Handwriting ~ 5

Grammar ~ 5

Spelling ~ 5

History ~ 3

Science ~ 2

Rosetta Stone ~ 3

Art ~ 1

Music appreciation ~ 1

Next, I wrote the days of the week on a sheet of paper and plugged the subjects in...

The 5 day-per-week subjects were no-brainers.  Next I put in the 3 day per week ones, then the 2 days, and lastly plugged in the 1 day per week subjects on the days I felt I was willing to have more to do.

However, when I looked at this schedule, I truly wondered how I would ever accomplish it all in the afternoon (traditionally, the time frame we work within), as well as find that much-needed hour to school Child #3.

I'll explain how I worked through this issue in Part 2...