My MC is going through boot camp. Physically and mentally, he goes from high-school boy to soldier prepared for combat. Along the way there's struggles, there's new friendships formed, there's the changing interaction with his family (we're talking Israeli boot camp - he's home every third weekend).

This is what I'm struggling with:

Boot camp is mostly very repetitive. So I show little flashes of it: first day, first time on guard, first Shabbat dinner on the base, first time firing a rifle. Then I go back to the same tasks a month later, and they're routine - they're happening in the background, while something else takes the focus of the scene.

Similarly, J.K. Rowling starts Hogwarts with a first Potions lesson, first Transfiguration lesson, etc. Problem is, Rowling can put all the "firsts" in the course of one in-story week. In boot camp, "firsts" are spread over a longer period of time. I find myself with relatively short scenes, and time-skips of a week or two between them. The overall feel is very disjointed.

To explain differently, when a movie shows a training montage (example from Mulan), it is understood that there are time skips between the short frames of training (not only between beginning and end). In a written medium, this doesn't work.

I could see those scenes working as short diary entries - in a diary format, you expect time skips when nothing interesting happens, and short entries when the character writing is tired. But I'm writing in third person limited, so a diary format wouldn't work.

How can I reduce the "choppiness" of my narrative? At the moment, I feel I'm giving my reader separate pictures, each framed and hung in sequence, when what I should be giving them is a movie, if that metaphor makes sense.