If I don't write this down I will never remember how to do this next year!
First! Figure out your curriculum choices. As you know I pull from a lot of sources. I like using a 12 week per term schedule. We schedule 3 terms per year for a total of 36 weeks. I fill in everything we are using into a grid. (I borrow the grid from Ambleside Online because I use most of their program.)Then I start breaking things down into manageable chunks. Using Simply Charlotte Mason's "Planning Your Charlotte Mason Education" is a BIG help here!
I wanted to have a good idea of what the week would look like so I made a Monday through Friday grid with all the subjects. This gave me a chance to figure out how heavy or light our days would be.
I realized after doing it this way I still had some steps to cover. I couldn't identify here how heavy the days were for each child in this form. So I created another one (borrowed from SCM.)
Charlotte Mason advised that subjects should be alternated in a way that doesn't tire the student. "The brain, or some portion of the brain, becomes exhausted when any
given function has been exercised too long. The child has been doing
sums for some time, and is getting unaccountably stupid: take away his
slate and let him read history, and you find his wits fresh again.
Imagination, which has had no part in the sums, is called into play by
the history lesson, and the child brings a lively unexhausted power to
his new work” (Vol. 1, p. 24).
I haven't ordered the subjects. In fact when I made our daily check off sheets (I love checking off completed tasks!) I hadn't even thought of divvying the subjects up between family, daughter and son. This last form needs revising but I still want to share the rough draft of what that list will look like. (Just overlook the "scheduling errors" on this form).