Block Scheduling for the Win

We’re coming to the end of our block schedule trial period, and I think it has worked well.  It’s always nice when ideas are in fact as good as you’d hoped.

So how does block scheduling working for us?  I divided 6 of her classes into categories; writing and literature are in language arts, math and science are in stem, art and computer programing are electives. That way she would have some variety to what she did each day, no one wants to spend hours just writing papers or solving equations. Then I looked closer at the workload of each class. Literature has more reading than writing and chemistry has more reading than math. So literature and math are on one day while chemistry and writing are on the other.  Art and computer are pretty equal so they were randomly assigned.

History is still an everyday subject. Latin class is two days a week and assignments are done the other three days. 

I had handwritten out my assignment book, so that is staying.  It’s too much work to rewrite. But I use different colored highlighters to mark what has been done each day. Merry’s assignment pages were typed so each week I am simply rearranging the classes and reprinting. 

It’s still early in the year, but it looks like we’ve found a solution that works.

So that didn’t go as well as I hoped

We jumped back into school last week, and immediately we were floundering. Day one it was obvious that fitting eight subjects into the day, especially if one was an hour long online, was not going to work.  So I took my carefully crafted lesson plans and I tried to figure out what to cut.

I debate cutting classes, reducing workload, or just restructuring classes. Mostly I stared at all my hard work which was beginning to feel like a waste.

Then I looked a little closer at how the day had gone and what else we could change. A huge draw on our time was just switching classes, eight times we got out book and put away book. So I thought back to my high school years and “block scheduling.” 

Last week we tried it for two of the days, we doubled up on three classes (and had two regular classes) rather than doing all eight. The next day we doubled up on the three classes we had missed (and had our two regular classes.) That went great. She even finished early one of the days. Then we had all eight classes again on Friday. But knowing it was going to be a long day going into it helped the day’s flow. It didn’t have the same overwhelming effect that our first day had had.

So we will try block scheduling for the rest of the month at least. Some of Merry’s classes will need done everyday, Latin and History. The other six we will alternate with Chemistry, Writing, and Art on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Trigonometry, Literature, and Programing on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Then Fridays she’ll have all her classes. 

We can’t call it a success yet, but being willing to adjust is important both for my student and for me. So at least we are succeeding in flexibility.