How Variable are Your Homeschool Days/Weeks

[Cassy]

I have a beautifully laid out schedule detailing everything everyone should be doing at each moment of each day throughout the week. Once or twice over the past year we've followed this schedule to the letter. When we have a good day we cover most of what we're supposed to. However, we've never consistently got everything done that we're supposed to. Sometimes it's just the odd day in a week when something happens to throw us off course. Sometimes whole weeks go by and we manage to do no more than the basics: reading, maths, writing. Maybe it's because someone's ill, or we're away at the weekend and I spend a lot of the week trying to catch up on my chores for the week, or we have some event and we're all to bed late, then get up late and the day just disappears.

 

Most of the time I try to be relaxed, go with the flow, do my best; after all that's one of the perks of homeschooling, isn't it? But there's always that nagging doubt at the back of my mind that I might be short-changing my kids. If they were in school the teacher would continue to teach them no matter what else was going on. Of course, I do realise that the teacher doesn't have to worry about providing meals, cleaning and tidying, taking them to activities, to the doctors, dentist, barbers ...

 

Should I be trying harder to be disciplined and follow our schedule no matter what? To push on through illnesses (theirs and mine), ignore the cleaning that piles up if my cleaners let me down this week, drag myself out of bed at 7 am even if we've been to bed late and I feel terrible?

 

What do other people do? Do you fret if a number of days/weeks of less than satisfactory school has been achieved? How long would you go if you seemed to never get around to some subjects before you'd feel you had to make some serious changes in your life?

 

Many thanks in advance

 

Cassy

[choirfarm]

How old are your kids? I was very flexible, very laid back when they were younger. Now that they are older, I am not. I take a blank calendar for each month of the year and I make a very loose plan. For example one week will say TOG week 1, Physical Science module 1, etc. For chalkdust I will pencil on 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc. I leave some days blank. I also put catch-up week sometimes with nothing on it. Now we normally start in July and we have taken various family vacations throughout the year. I don't always know when they will be, nor when grandma will go to the hospital, a kid will need tonsils out, etc. I never take my catch up week when I pencil it in, but the room is in the schedule. Then every couple of weeks, I check the plan and check off what we have done. Oh..we are a whole week ahead in math..hooray! Oh, boy we are a whole module behind in science...they MUST do this every day.

 

That system has worked pretty well. These are not detailed lesson plans that I make just bare outlines of where I want to be with time off, a sanity day etc. As I said, I never take them when they are scheduled. Instead, when someone is in intensive care and we are off a week, I don't panic because I have a free week scheduled later. But then I know we just cannot slack anymore. I have a good idea of where we should be when. I hope this makes sense.

 

As I said, when the boys were in 2nd and 4th, we just covered what we covered. I really didn't care. As they got into junior high, it mattered more. Now this year they will be in 9th and 11th and it really matters. Plus my oldest is taking to AP courses online and a couple of community college courses, so our flexibility and family vacations will be over. Well.. we can take long weekends as his courses are T, W TH.

 

Christine

[Joyofsixreboot]

I do NOT like a timed schedule. With 9 people living here something will come up. Count on it. We do have a normal flow to the day and I have goals we almost always get to but from the outside it probably looks chaotic.

[iquilt]

We are a "do-the-next-thing" schedule family. I have a weekly plan of what needs to be covered each week in order for us to get to travel with dh on his next business trip or to take a longer break at Christmas, whatever the decision, and if we get it done we go. We use a basic block schedule for our days (history on T and Th, math everyday, etc.) that allows us to see what we have to do. I try to be flexible with the times and I always try to remember to look at the whole week. Sometimes last year Wednesdays were a wash because of our outside activities but that meant our Fridays had more work to finish. This year we are cutting back on outside activities to allow more time for adding subjects and more flex time. HTH

[Lily_Grace]

There's a reason our daily to-do list is written in pencil. ;) Things come up. It happens. Yes, even at school. Last year my son went to public school and had 3 power outages, 2 months with a substitute, fire drills and random other occurrences. Things come up.

 

We have a system here of sitting down for weekly goal planning and monthly conferences: what he has accomplished, what he wants to accomplish in the next week/month, and my goals for him. It gives us a chance to readjust and focus on what's important.

[nd293]

If they were in school the teacher would continue to teach them no matter what else was going on.

 

It's hard not to think this, because we don't have the teacher's year planner in front of us, but I have come to doubt it's really true. Teachers' strikes, natural disasters, the death of political leaders and a win by the national soccer team (really) are all events I've seen lead to lost school days, and those days were never "made up".

 

I aim to finish those programmes that a) work in graded levels, or b) cost a fortune. In maths, for instance, we finish each year, but we might skip most exercises in some areas to achieve that goal. In literature, we might skip written exercises for some lessons, and just discuss the questions. I try to have a lot of subjects that can be done more-or-less independently, so dd can work even when I'm not available. And I assign reading (and audio books) when things get tough.

 

Not perfect, but it's that or back to school - I can't be a full-time teacher and parent, and house-keeper, and ... and ... and...!

[NanceXToo]

It varies for us...we're pretty relaxed and mainly go with the flow...I know we could NEVER follow a daily schedule, but like someone else said, I tend to have weekly lists of things we need to get done that week. Usually we are able to accomplish it, and if we don't, we accomplish the most important things on it and some of the others may get pushed back to the following week. Eventually, we either get them done, or I decide they weren't important enough to worry about, but it all works out pretty well for the most part.

 

You might enjoy this:

 

http://nancextoo.livejournal.com/175611.html

 

:)

[SailorMom]

We have a general "what we do next" schedule -but times have never worked. Some days, we have to spend 3 hours on a science labs. Other days my son struggles with a new algebra concept...

I have, at times, had him put aside whatever he was working on to save as homework so that we could move on, but not at any specific time.

[Cassy]

Thanks everyone, you've really helped me seen things more clearly.

 

I really like the idea of a more general weekly plan, trying my best to do everything on that as and when we can. Maybe I also need to look at how realistic my plans are.

 

My three at home are DS10, DS6 (almost 7) and DS4. It would probably be wise to be more strict with what I hope to achieve with DS10, be very relaxed about DS4, and somewhere in between with DS6. At the moment I tend to concentrate more on whoever is being most pesky :tongue_smilie:, which is usually DS6, while DS10 gets left a bit sometimes because he's occupying himself quietly and constructively (which is also good too).

 

Many thanks again

 

Cassy