He's a details man. 
There are many ways to do this and no one "right" way, but this is one option to ponder that I shared with Florence awhile ago : 
They have been so helpful for me in developing a schedule for my dc doing Bigger this year. Thanks!!! I was looking over your new schedule and comparing it to your old one and I'm wondering when are you doing the Cheerful cursive and dictation now? I'm wondering how you are fitting everything in with a child who likes to take extra time on drawing or art. I'm finding that on the days we are doing any sort of notebook activity, we are running over our allotted times. I have been having them finish some things after school time, but on others (like painting), I can't really do that. I'm wondering how to best adjust our schedule so that I'm not rushing my dc too much or punishing them for taking extra time on the activity by always making it homework. I could just increase that block of time, but then on days when we don't have notebooking or an art activity, we would run way ahead of time. We also have 2 days a week that we have an outside activity to go to so we need to finish on time. Since the art and notebooking activities are not scheduled for the same day each week, that's making it a little more difficult for me to figure out how to incorporate the extra time. Any suggestions? 
Anyway, I swapped it out for the revised one now. I try to add 15-20 minutes to the alloted times for any assignments my ds is wanting to be more creative in, but I still say "no" sometimes. HTH!
I'm guessing since it is 3 instead of 2 that I probably shouldn't have allotted just 10 minutes. The first few days that we were reviewing, 10 minutes was fine, but now that we're into new things, it's taking us much longer. I think I need to revise that block and possibly move things around a bit to try to accommodate more time for grammar. I really don't like schedules and don't like following one, but my dh and I decided that our dc really needed the structure. So I've used your schedules and times to develop our schedule and overall it's working really well. My dc are thriving on the schedule and I'm adapting. 
Art and science on the same day takes my creative lovin' little guy longer too, but like you said, it's not often. Are you doing a portion of R & S English 3 orally? We did that with our oldest ds - about 2/3 orally and about 1/3 written - and it made it go much more quickly. It has not hurt his retention (he's doing the second half of 4 now). Maybe you could try that if you aren't already? Otherwise, I wonder if you could do it half-speed? They could finish it during PHFHG then, which is the guide it's scheduled in anyway. However, I do know everyone has different grammar goals, so maybe that isn't an option you'd want to consider. I'm so glad your dc are thriving on the schedule - and that you are adapting too!pjdobro wrote:That does help. Thanks! I've been thinking about it more since I posted and realized that the History notebooking and Science notebooking each have their own day each week and not the same day as each other. So it's more the art box on the same day as Science notebooking that ran us long one day and I'm sure that won't happen often. I realized as I studied on it that the R&S3 grammar is more what has caused us to be off schedule lately. It's taken us more like 30 minutes instead of 10.
I really appreciate you sharing your schedules!
The truth is, I don't like to be on a schedule always either, but I do need it to get done with school and get to the rest of my responsibilities in life - so, it's a must for me to stay cheerful and to keep all those plates spinning at once. Thanks!
I did write some of the diagrams on the white board to lessen the amount of writing, but I figured I couldn't do that all the time because they have to figure out which way to draw the diagrams. 
I haven't looked ahead yet to see what is coming up this week. When we are having to do more writing, it might be helpful to slow the pace down a bit. I'll take a look at that and see if that seems like a good option. I hadn't really thought about going half-speed, but I think we would still be on track grammar wise, so that is an option. We really like grammar though and they might miss it if we don't do it everyday. I was telling my dh that our dc really like grammar and I think a lot of the reason they like it so well is the fact that we do it orally. We try to get some action into it as well. For example, if we're figuring out which group of words is a sentence and which is a fragment, we'll do something like stand up for the sentence and fall down for the fragment. They like this and have fun with it. Now that I think about, maybe we have too much fun with it! They do sometimes ask to do more, but we have pretty much stayed right with the book. We'll give it another week or two and see how it goes and make adjustments as needed. Thanks for your suggestions! 
I thought I may be alone in being such a lover of grammar!pjdobro wrote:...We really like grammar though and they might miss it if we don't do it everyday.
I have always enjoyed grammar, but R & S English takes the cake. It is just the most solidly written, God-honoring grammar program I've ever seen. For what it's worth, I do the first about 1/3 of the diagramming ones on the markerboard as examples, then I draw the lines for the next 1/3 and he dictates what to write while I write it on the marker board, and finally he does the last 1/3 totally independently writing it in his composition book. That's just one way to do it though. If you are loving grammar and you don't mind the extra time it is taking, I'd just keep doing it the same way. But if you want to shave some time off your day, you could do something like that. I want to come to grammar at your house though - it sounds like fun! ), I think I am going to try to use that as my model once we get started. I had written up one schedule with ds using LHFHG (I had already decided we would do that half-speed) and Bigger full speed. But to get it all done, we would have to rush through things faster than I think she could handle. Also with occupying the 2 year old (also using ideas that I had gotten from your schedules posted in the past as well as some of the other wonderful and insightful ladies on this board!) and nursing the baby, and adjusting to the new house/unpacking, I was getting overwhelmed! This seems like it will be less stressful for me and more benificial to my dd. I do think it sounds like half-speed Bigger would be a great fit all-around. We liked our full-speed Bigger Hearts days, but we LOVE our half-speed ones! My ds is really getting into it and enjoying letting his creative juices flow. I am enjoying it as well! I bet you will too, and I hope your little baby is doing well and you're adjusting to your expanded family.