Just as the rhythms of the Church provide both permanence and newness, the Learning Cycles are structured with the intention of providing order and continuity over time, yet with new things to put our minds to each year and term, at a depth that grows over time. Cycles are designed to allow families or communities to be learning many things together over a four-year cycle (because learning is fundamentally a communal process), while also providing a means for individual students to be adequately challenged according to their abilities. 

Communities can begin on any cycle,  and each one has booklists and schedules geared to different levels of learning so students, families, and schools can jump in, and continue sequentially through them, at varying depths. Studying specific topics at specific times, as a community, enables us to dig in more deeply together, better anticipate and efficiently plan upcoming studies, and provides us with many layers of context, as we explore and learn about distinct periods and eras in history more fully. All while taking care not to sacrifice quality or overemphasize a drawn-out, purely chronologically study of history that can often result in losing sight of the learner and ideal timing, merely for the sake of a system.