5th Grade Daily Schedule

It’s always an adventure with Miss Thing! She’s our oldest child, so she gets “experimented” on the most… poor girl! Because she is our “learn on child”, I am actually quite grateful that she’s such a unique learner! There’s no plopping her down with a stack of books and expecting her to get them finished with no trouble! We have to learn to work with her inclinations and personality as well as be able to accomplish our educational and character goals for her and have time to make sure the little boys are learning to read and write properly.

She’s a child with “diagnosis” that we have had to learn to work with and use as advantages. She’s diagnosed ADD, dyslexic, and SPD. Does that scare me? Eh… it did! Now, I’m so glad that I have a chance to learn how to tailor her education to her unique mind!

One of the ways that we customize this, and have her working towards being an independent learner (or really, accomplishing anything at all without serious frustration and tears on both our parts) is to keep her in control of her own daily schedule. She’s not a child who can just do whatever, whenever and still thrive… she’s like her momma in that we need to know what’s happening, when, why, and how. We really struggled in this until I read “Managers of Their Schools” by Steve and Teri Maxwell. (That’s totally not an affiliate link, I just think their stuff rocks!)

We sit down and divide her school work into subjects. We get totally detailed. Lumping spelling and poetry together? Not here, buddy! We need to know exactly how long she’s working on each and every single assignment each day so we decide how much time we have available to work on each subject each day. We have to make sure she’ll be getting her required daily hours in. (We’re in Kentucky so we have to have 6 hours a day for 177 academic –or “book learning”- days and 10 “extra” days that can be used for other academic pursuits.) Then we decide how much time our Morning Meeting will take each day. What we end up with is what you see below:

Miss Thing’s Daily Schedule

Bible- 30 Minutes

Health/ Art- 15 Minutes

Spelling- 15 Minutes

Vocabulary- 15 Minutes

Writing- 15 Minutes

Reading- 45 Minutes

Math- 30 Minutes

Poetry- 15 Minutes

Grammar- 30 Minutes

Science- 30 Minutes

History- 30 Minutes

Geography- 15 Minutes

“Morning Meeting with Mom”- 45 Minutes

There we have our full 360 minute, 6 hour school day! She’s put these in the order she prefers to do them most days, although she can do them in any order at any time of the day (except for the Morning Meeting, which we actually do 2:00 in the afternoon) as long as she does them all every school day. This usually works out as a regular 8:30am-3:30pm school day, although some days, she’ll do school from 12:00pm-6:00pm or 6:30am-12:30pm or 7:00am-9:30am + 10:45am-1:45pm + 4:00pm-5:30pm or… well, you get the idea.  

Please note: This may not be the best thing for YOUR 5th grader, but it’s what works best for MINE. Every child is different and every child should get the absolute best education possible for them, which includes having a school schedule that works with their own needs and personalities.