History and Science Scheduling

[butterfly113]

In looking ahead to the middle school years, I am wondering which would work best. For those of you that have tried 2 days for science and 2 days for history, how did it work? Did you feel pushed or crammed to get everything done? Did it give you more time to accomplish everything?

 

I am wondering if it is better to do Science 2x/wk

and History 2x/wk

 

or History and Science 4x/wk in shorter periods...

 

Any thoughts? What has worked well for you???

 

Thanks!

[branycbur]

We do the 2 day/week approach. My dd doesn't care for science (and neither does her mother:) so it is nice not to have to do it everyday. And once we get going in an experiment the time flies so it works out well. We also both love history so having longer days for history is helpful.

[SilverMoon]

We do history on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and science on Tuesday and Thursday. We've tried various schedules with these two subjects over the years and keep coming back to this. Having just one each day lets them go deeper, and doesn't clutter up the day. We only felt crammed when we tried getting both done on the same day.

[Pam B]

In looking ahead to the middle school years, I am wondering which would work best. For those of you that have tried 2 days for science and 2 days for history, how did it work? Did you feel pushed or crammed to get everything done? Did it give you more time to accomplish everything?

 

I am wondering if it is better to do Science 2x/wk

and History 2x/wk

 

or History and Science 4x/wk in shorter periods...

 

Any thoughts? What has worked well for you???

 

Thanks!

 

:bigear: I would like to know this as well!!!

[Karis]

We'll do History MWF and Science T/TH

[Embassy]

I do two days of history/geography and two days of science per week. I like the longer periods because it gives us time to work on projects. If they were shorter we would barely get into things before having to move on.

[Oakblossoms]

We tend to do History one week and Science the next. It depends on how interesting things are. Sometimes Science is and that gets more attention for a few weeks and we put History off.

[Chris in VA]

We do much more history than science--science just doesn't get done if we run out of steam. We will have to change that next year.

 

Because I want dd to make a notebook page (not getting done consistently this year), do the map, do some sort of activity (again, not so much this year--we don't really like a lot of the suggestions in SOTW 3's AG), and use the tests as worksheets (I'd like her to retain something this year, not just "experience" history), we need multiple interactions with the material. For us, about 30 minutes about 4 times a week seems to be ok.

 

For science, I'm just never really prepared. She loves it tho, and it's the one area where I really feel I'm failing dd. In public school, they often had "waste of time" videos and did not do a lot of experiences and experiments. She's very hands-on for science--I will probably try to find her a class next year where she can really have some fun. If I try to do it in small bits, it doesn't get done. If I try to do it over 2 days in the week, sometimes it's overwhelming for me to try to prepare that much content.