Approaches to Teaching: Loop Your Homeschool Subjects

Loop schooling, loop schedule, and loop subjects are beginning to be hot topic words within homeschool circles. If you don’t know someone using this type of planning, you likely will come across someone soon. Loop schooling is becoming popular, largely because it allows homeschoolers to cover a wider range of topics without stressing about set schedules. For example, if you often get distracted with doing fun family things on Friday’s, anything scheduled for Friday’s is often missed. Loop schooling is one of the approaches to teaching used to avoid the continuous skipping of the same subject matter. There are many different ways to loop your education, and you will need to find what works for your family but here are a few ideas.

What is Loop Schooling?

Before we discuss different ideas, we should be sure to specify what loop schooling actually is and what it looks like for your planning. Essentially loop scheduling is where you make a list of the subjects or resources you want to cover and loop through them repeatedly instead of assigning them each to a day. If you miss a few days, that is fine; you just pick up with the next thing on the list after what you last completed. If this approach to teaching still seems confusing, it should make more sense after the next two examples. 

Morning Basket

If morning basket is another term you don’t feel familiar with, this article helps explain it. It is a selection of resources you go through during your morning time together as a family. These resources are often kept in a basket, but they don’t have to be. 

Morning basket time is an ideal place to utilize a loop. Depending on your children, you may only have time during your morning time together to get through a couple of things. You may put many amazing resources in your basket you’d love to use, but you just never seem to have time.

Enter looping!

Looping allows you to get through everything! You order your resources and go through them in order. If you do resources 1 and 2 on Monday, sleep in too long on Tuesday to get it done, get through resource 3 on Wednesday, when you sit down Thursday morning, you know you’re picking up resource 4. This way you aren’t constantly frustrated that you never have time to get to everything. 

The only thing in the morning I wouldn’t add to my loop would be Bible. That is something that takes precedence over all over subjects, and we would read our Bible and go over our calendar daily and then begin our loop subjects. 

Looping Extra Subjects

Most homeschool families will have some subjects that they really focus on and do daily and other subjects that they do occasionally. While how subjects are prioritized is different per family, commonly math and language arts, as well as Bible, are done most days while the other subjects happen 1-3 times a week. Those “extra” subjects are what you will loop.  

For example, how this could work would be that you do your daily subjects in the morning (Bible, LA, Math) and then after lunch you do your next subject on your loop list. Each family’s loop will look different, depending on what they want to include, but we will share a possible example. Your loop list may look like

• History
• Science
• Current Events
• Typing
• Art
• Music

Once you establish which subjects you want in your loop, you just cycle through them. For instance, on Monday morning you will do your daily subjects and then at whatever time you do your loop subjects, you start with the first one (history in this example). Tuesday during your loop time you do science. Wednesday you have lots to do around the house and don’t get to any of your loop schedules. Thursday the kids are really attentive, it’s a rainy day, and you decide to do two. So you see what is next and get through current events and typing.  Friday you have no school and are away for the weekend. Next Monday during loop time, you pick up where you left off and do some art. 

Of course, the example above is just a list tossed out there. You may want to split the bigger subjects up with some of the smaller things like typing. How you make your list is totally up to you, and you could even include things like baking or anything you want to make sure you’re consistently covering but wouldn’t do daily. Then you just cycle through them repeatedly on the days you get to them. This ensures one of these loop subjects doesn’t get lots of time while others get forgotten. This is one of many of the wonderful homeschool approaches to teaching out there.

And there you have it! Loop scheduling! 

What subjects are in your loop?

This article has been written by homeschooling staff writers of The Canadian Schoolhouse (TCS). Enjoy more of our content from TCS contributors and staff writers by visiting our Front Door page that has content on our monthly theme and links to all our content sections.