Year Round School Schedule

[AllBoys]

If you school year round, are all of your courses at the same point? Do you still schedule by week 1, week 2, etc? If not is it difficult to make sure you are not falling behind in a course or not finishing it within a year, or does that not matter?

[pageta]

We do 36 weeks of school and my goal is to do 3 weeks per month (simple math). So I divide our curriculum like I would if we did the 180 day schedule and go from there. Some months we don't make our goal (# of school days) and others we exceed it. But in the end, it all works out and we finish our curriculum as planned by the end of the school year.

[Friederike in Persia]

Well, most of the books we use are designed to be used during one school year that is shorter than what we do. I then add in other books and things to do, before starting the next book in that programm. E.g. when ds had finished his Apologia book we did some Adventures with Atoms, when the dds had finished with their German we read another book and discussed it,...

For LA we got our MCT books some time in Feb. last year and are totally out of sink with a normal school year. It worries dd13, but I keep telling her it doesn't matter. As long as they're on level or ahead to where ps is at their age I don't mind where we exactly are. Ds on the other hand loves being ahead with Singapore Maths and doesn't mind at all that he's in the middle of a book just before we're going on holiday.:tongue_smilie:

[lea1]

I divide everything up to finish in 36 weeks and have the file folder system with folders numbered from 1 to 36. Within each weekly folder, I have smaller folders with D1, D2, D3, D4 on them (we typically school 4 days a week).

 

You can either have your Week 1 start in the fall or in January, which ever works for you.

 

ETA: Some courses finish earlier than others. If they finish before the 36 weeks is up, I just start the next course.

Edited July 23, 2012 by Lea in OK

[wy_kid_wrangler04]

I am not super huge into planning. (ducking tomatoes) I found I was MUCH more stressed when I did. I make a basic outline when needed and just start scheduling from there. It works.

 

 

We are actually moving ahead by schooling this way-- not at all behind. We school more than 'required' but it feels like less because of how often we get breaks, does that make sense?

[Woodland Mist Academy]

I usually make small lines in pencil in the table of contents of the teacher's manual dividing it into 12 months or whatever period of time I plan to use it. I can tell at a glance if we are somewhere near where I hoped to be at any given time. I adjust as needed.

 

I don't make detailed plans for the year, only guidelines. We just do the next lessons, page, problem, etc. each day.

[Ellie]

I never used anything that it mattered when we finished one thing in relation to something else.

 

We took off Thanksgiving to about the middle of January; a couple of weeks around Easter, a couple of weeks in late August/early September, and any other time we needed a break. We just worked on things and moved on to the next thing whenever we finished.

[GoVanGogh]

We school year-round, but I schedule by day, not week. (Day 1, Day 2, etc.) Some weeks we may only school 1 or 2 days... I like being able to pick up and go for that day and not stress if we don't get a full week's work done. (We end up with odd breaks, due to travel and outside activities.)

 

It is very unusual for us to be in the same place in our books at the same time. It doesn't bother me, though. Some we finish within the year, some we carry over. As long as we are on a forward course, all is well.

[Night Elf]

Well, ds16 is in high school now but we've always schooled year round. I treat each course separately. When one is finished, we roll right into the next one. IOW, like we always did, when one textbook is finished, we begin the next level. So no, we're not in the same week for every course, but that has never bothered me. I actually prefer having them staggered.

 

I use Excel to plan my weeks. He's currently doing 5 subjects so we have the subject names across the top, and the dates listed down the side. Then we check off as we go along. I prefer using Excel because sometimes I have to make adjustments to the schedule and Excel makes it easy to move things around.

[mommy5]

We divide up the year by 4 quarters - 9 weeks in each. We don't schedule a lot of breaks in but we tend to do 3-4 weeks on and 1 week off. We take off 1 week in between quarters. I make a binder up for each kid with all their workbook work in it for each week (divider tabs per week) of the quarter. The rest of their work for the other quarters is in a hanging file. Each week I grab all of their work out of their binder and put it in their individual multipocket folders so they have everything in their for the week. I also keep a schedule of books/reading and anything not workbook related and keep a checklist of what we've done and need to do to complete each week of the quarter.

[kolamum]

Yes & no. We school for about 42 weeks vs 36. So that gives us time. When we get to the end we may only do 41 if all our stuff is done. It gives us a little extra room to wiggle around with.

 

We do take most of our time off in the summer months, but ours are different from yours.

[kroe1]

We don't school on a schedule, per se, rather time. Each subject was given about 15 minutes in the elementary years, gradually increasing to about 30 minutes in the high school years. Whatever gets finished in the day is done, and whatever doesn't get finished during the time slot gets put off until the next day. The courses all finish at different times during the year. When one course finishes, we start another course.

 

:)

[happypamama]

I aim to be done sometime in May, so we can have a nice break, which worked out so well this past year. Just enough of a break to recharge, but not so much that everyone got bored. We start pretty close to July 1, and I aim to be about halfway by shortly before Christmas, so we can have a nice break then as well. If we're not halfway by Christmas, we still have plenty of time to work harder in the late winter and spring. And if some subjects get ahead of others, no big deal; we'll do other things for those subjects, or start the next book, or whatever.

[tabrizia]

We just started, but I am not worried about keeping everything on the same schedule. We are actually finishing the first half of this years Math book in one month, so if I was worried about it I would be in trouble anyways. We are just doing as much as needed each day and I figure we'll finish things as they finish and then move on to the next level.

[Desert Rat]

I don't worry about when we finish anything. We just keep plugging along. A lot of times we finish quickly and just move onto the next thing so we are sort of ahead. But then some things we have really lingered on and are taking our time. SOTW, for example. We should be done with SOTW 4 by now had we done one book per year. But we didn't. We took longer. I'm fine with that.

 

:iagree: Except that we had a 42 week school year so I could finish SOTW in one school year. Now that we're finished with SOTW (I actually cycled through it twice!), I don't know if we'll keep the longer school year or not. That's orginally one of the reasons I started the longer school year.

 

This is our last week. It's actually #41. We're finishing the last 2 chapters of SOTW 4. We will take 3 weeks off and start again August 20. We take from Thanksgiving through New Years off. We also take off a week in February and May for the boys' birthdays. That's a total of 10 weeks of vacation.

 

As for all of the curricula, some I wait until the next school year starts after we finish it (spelling, grammar, vocabulary-they like the break and are ahead.) Some I roll right into the next one (logic, math, foreign language). I'm heading to a more structured science this year because I stink at teaching it, so we'll see how it goes.

HTH

[marbel]

I don't worry about when we finish anything. We just keep plugging along. A lot of times we finish quickly and just move onto the next thing so we are sort of ahead. But then some things we have really lingered on and are taking our time. SOTW, for example. We should be done with SOTW 4 by now had we done one book per year. But we didn't. We took longer. I'm fine with that.

 

I remember being "stuck" in parts of SOTW - it seemed to take FOREVER to get out of the Medieval and Renaissance times! No regrets on that, though. We're ready for high school level medieval history and my kids can't wait! (If we didn't have camps and trips coming up, we'd be working on it now.)

 

I can't imagine doing it any other way than this with my kids. Some things just take more time. As we get into high school, I feel like I need to get much more structured to prep for college courses but it still feels odd to say that we're going to finish x course in x number of weeks.

 

It may take a very long time to get one of mine through algebra! :001_huh:;)