Block Scheduling/year round schooling

[erinfontenot]

Hello, I was considering switching from a traditional school year schedule to a year round schedule with 6 weeks on and 1 week off with 4 weeks off for summer, 2 weeks at Christmas and 2 weeks at Easter. My idea was to concentrate on less subjects at a time as to not overwhelm all at once but spread it out. I was thinking of doing spanish and history one six weeks and latin and science the next and rotate like that. That way I don't feel like we are doing 12 subjects in a day or in a week for that matter. Can anyone give me their input on this? I would greatly appreciate it. I have a dd 11, twin boys 9, ds, 2 and a dd, 4 months. Thanks so much....erin.

[Barb_]

Hello, I was considering switching from a traditional school year schedule to a year round schedule with 6 weeks on and 1 week off with 4 weeks off for summer, 2 weeks at Christmas and 2 weeks at Easter. My idea was to concentrate on less subjects at a time as to not overwhelm all at once but spread it out. I was thinking of doing spanish and history one six weeks and latin and science the next and rotate like that. That way I don't feel like we are doing 12 subjects in a day or in a week for that matter. Can anyone give me their input on this? I would greatly appreciate it. I have a dd 11, twin boys 9, ds, 2 and a dd, 4 months. Thanks so much....erin.

 

We've always done the year round thing so that we're free to take off a day or week or month whenever. I don't do well with a strict schedule and I've decided to embrace my inner bohemian and work with her. We also do something like loose semesters. We intensely focus on 3-4 areas at a time, letting subjects kind of roll off and fall by the wayside while picking up others. I tend to reevaluate and recenter every 3 months or so to make sure we eventually cover everything. I think you need to decide how you work best and make your schedule work for you rather than the other way around.

 

Barb

[SquirrellyMama]

I've often wanted to do Block Scheduling. I wasn't sure that my kids were old enough though. How old are your kids?

[Pamela H in Texas]

I think switching off the science and history every 6 weeks is FINE....

 

However, I don't think that will work with Latin/Spanish. What if you switched off every other day like high schools sometimes do? I'm not sure you could even do every other week with languages.

[mom2agang]

I do it. I focus on math english and spelling year around. Then 6weeks of history 6weeks of science. Every 6 weeks we change our foreign language but I also spend 5min a day reviewing the ones we learned. When we do history I spend about 5 minutes a day doing geography and when we do science I will focus on one thing like flowers or body parts or bugs for 5 minutes. To me they seem to gasp more and it shortened my days.

[sunflowerlady]

I'm not sure what block scheduling is, but we follow a loose, year round homeschool routine. We just started our new year this week.:)

 

What I plan to do, is school less formally over the summer. We are doing a read aloud of dd's choice, English From the Roots Up, Bible reading and memory work, and some art and science.

 

Then when the traditional year starts, we will change it up a bit. I will set aside some things we are using , and add in math and other language arts.

 

This way, I think I will cover more in a year, and we will have more variety.