Schooling Year Round vs Following PS Calendar

[nikkistone]

We are taking our 3 kids out of public school and will homeschoool in the fall. I like the idea of schooling year round (we live in Texas and it gets intolerably hot in the summer -- might as well do school instead!). But one of my "fears" of homeschooling year round is the neighborhood kids.

 

Will it be difficult to do school (for me AND my kids) when the neighborhood kids (my kids' friends) are having fun at the pool or going to fun events?

 

Will it be that much more difficult to play with other friends (and get that all important socialization - wink!) if we're not following the public school calendar?

 

My kids have been in public school for several years, and I am a product of the school system. So I'm a little entrenched in the ways of the system. I realize that, now that we are homeschooling, we have the freedom to do what we want, including when we do school. But I'm having a little problem exercising that freedom.

 

What say you, hive?

[Ellie]

We are taking our 3 kids out of public school and will homeschoool in the fall. I like the idea of schooling year round (we live in Texas and it gets intolerably hot in the summer -- might as well do school instead!). But one of my "fears" of homeschooling year round is the neighborhood kids.

 

Will it be difficult to do school (for me AND my kids) when the neighborhood kids (my kids' friends) are having fun at the pool or going to fun events?

 

Will it be that much more difficult to play with other friends (and get that all important socialization - wink!) if we're not following the public school calendar?

 

My kids have been in public school for several years, and I am a product of the school system. So I'm a little entrenched in the ways of the system. I realize that, now that we are homeschooling, we have the freedom to do what we want, including when we do school. But I'm having a little problem exercising that freedom.

 

What say you, hive?

 

One of the good things about homeschooling year-round is that if there are children in the neighborhood that you really prefer for your dc not to play with, you can just say "Sorry, we're doing school." :D

 

Yes, it will be weird to be doing Official School Stuff in the summer. It will be less weird and way more fun when you take off the whole month of December, or the grandparents come to visit in the middle of the week in April and y'all spend time with them, or you decide that y'all wave to the dc who are going to school in September while y'all spend the morning cuddled up reading good books together. Ok, not everyone cuddles up and reads good books together, lol, but you see what I mean. :-)

 

You can still go to the pool or to other fun events. You just don't have to let your minds turn to mush for three whole months in the summer, especially when one of those months, at least, will be stinkn' hot. You could take off one month during the best part of the summer, and take off another month in December, and another month divided into parts during the year.

 

See?

 

You can't let the neighborhood children define how your children will be educated. :-)

[boscopup]

My kids play with the girls across the street early in the morning, then come home when it's too hot. Then we can start school. I am more lax about school during summer, as I use it to ramp up for the new year.

 

Summer isn't really much different from the rest of the year for my kids though, as the girls across the street aren't school age. We also don't have a pool nearby.

[Arcadia]

For us it is easier as our neighborhood kids are at summer camps due to both parents working so we don't "see" them year round. My kids were in summer camp last week, and go to the condo pool when daddy is back from work. It is hard for me to keep an eye on both my boys at the pool as they are not good swimmers yet. We still go to all the fun events that my kids are interested in, we just schedule round them. We had done school at the library, McDonald's and at the dentist office. We had even done school in an airplane using ipads since it helps make them sleepy on a long flight.

My kids prefer going year round as it is less of a transition from only playing all summer to schooling. We do light schooling though so about 2hrs maximum per weekday.

[Mrs Twain]

I mostly follow the school schedule because almost all of my kids' friends go to public school. It is much easier to plan things with their friends since we are on the same schedule. Plus it helps us to share special events with them, such as counting down the days to Christmas break or summer vacation. We often get invited during the summer or on holidays to do special things with their friends, such as apple picking or a group outing to the pool. I would feel very badly if we routinely had to say we couldn't go because we were doing school that day when everyone is off. If that were the case, our friends would probably quit calling us. We have worked so hard to make good friends for the kids (which is much harder when homeschooliing versus public schooling), and I don't want to do things to hurt those friendships or cause people to think we are weirder than they already think we are because we homeschool.

 

So generally I follow the public school schedule for social reasons and not because I want to be part of that educational system. However I do adjust the schedule so we can take an extra week off in February to go on vacation when it is cheap.

[rdj2027]

We are schooling year round. I figure if they spend 3 or 4 hours a day doing school things in the summer that still leaves them with 21 per day hours for everything else.

[SarahW]

My kid just finished ps kindergarten and I started homeschooling him right away. Like TX, it's just too hot here during the day. There are no neighborhood kids though, so all social things are scheduled in advance, and I just school around it.

 

Some people advise "de-schooling" from ps when making the switch. A bit of time to let the brain switch off the "classroom" mode. Since my kid was only in K and I was already afterschooling I didn't feel that was necessary, but even so the first week he was telling me "On Monday I have PE, Tuesday is Computer Lab, Wednesday is Library" and so on. Uh-huh, that's nice, kid. Did you do science experiments every Friday? Didn't think so.

 

Even though I already had a good idea where my kid was in grade level, there has been some interesting discoveries concerning what he didn't know that I thought he should. And then there were the skills that his classroom didn't teach that I wanted him to have. So right now most of what we're doing is reviewing (using a completely different approach so he doesn't know it's review) and working on some specific skills.

 

So my advice to you if you want to start this summer is 1) find out their friend's schedules and block out time for school when there's no social activity likely to happen. 2) Concentrate on doing some "different" things during that time that fills in any gaps and prepares them for what you want to be doing with them when school starts full-time (and also, shows you how they like to learn, my kid actually really likes coloring and pasting projects, really??? &*^$#!). 3) Take advantage of social activities that involve learning outside a book - zoo, museum, camping, etc.

[IrishMum]

We school year round. I do allow time for my boys to play with their PS school friends. We could have half a days work done before it's an issue anyway. I don't make it a daily thing in the summer, maybe twice a week.

[CyndiLJ]

We do year round school, but we do part-time during the summer. I usually focus on "block learning" and do one subject for summer, usualyl the one that will take the most time. For example, we are doing Biology and Health this summer, and while we won't complete Biology, we will have health all done and a significant jump on Biology. We usually do 3-4 hours a day during the summer, versus our 8 hours a day during the school year.

[FairProspects]

I'm not going to lie - this is one of our biggest issues about homeschooling year round. We live in a busy, active neighborhood and kids come knocking at my door frequently.

 

Our compromise is that we do light school over the summer and are generally done by lunch. As we finish books toward the end of the year, I just don't replace them until fall, but they must do at least some math and LA everyday. Since many of the neighborhood kids don't wake up until around 11am, this is not too much of a sacrifice for my kids and they still get into join in with the neighborhood football games and bike races.

[Mom2TheTeam]

We school year round. I've never had an issue letting my kids skip school to do something fun with friends. They can't do it everyday, obviously, but it isn't every day something fun comes up. We do have neighborhood kids. They do come knocking, but it's almost always after school is done for the day. If not, we just call it a day.

 

The thing is doing school year round allows us the freedom to skip or take off at random and still get it all done. It's not been a problem for us and we don't miss out. :)

[lea_lpz]

This is our second year and so far school in summer has made sense for many of the reasons others mentioned, such as it being too hot to do much else, gives us more flexibility and time off during the school year, not having to reteach skills lost over break, etc. I also am appreciating the fact it gives structure to their day. Honestly it seems like more work to take a long break and plan out how to keep them occupied. Even my dss, who goes to ps, enjoys doing school time with us during the time he spends with us so he isn't bored.

 

We do school from 8 am to 12 pm with 2-3 breaks that are about 15 minutes Monday- Thursday. After lunch we have unstructured time, and swim lessons at 4:15. They get to play afterwards for about 45 minutes, come home, bathe and go play with the neighborhood kids while iI make dinner and do some tidying up / chores. During mid day it is too hot to play outside much so this works out fine because no one is really out during the day.

 

Fridays we do Exploration day and will go on field trips, do hands on math and science.

 

We do 10 weeks of school during the 12 weeks, with one week off for vacation and one week for Vacation Bible School.

 

During the school year we do one co-op a week, one exploration day, and 3 days of traditional school a week.

 

We do 32 weeks of school between after Labor Day and the first week of June. We take 6 weeks off for winter, 2 weeks off for Spring, Halloween, and the typical Federal Holidays for three day weekends.

 

This is worth the summer effort to me :)

[Loowit]

When I first started homeschooling my kids were really little. I loved being able to do our own thing. However, as they have gotten older it has gotten more complicated. I would love to just take off in the fall for a family trip when the weather was still nice and there weren't huge crowds. But now that my children are older and involved in activities that are based on the school schedule it isn't as easy. We still start a bit earlier in the fall and will take off breaks here and there, but we can't just leave town when we have commitments to other things. But I also don't do traditional school hours either. So we may take several days a month to do something fun or a day trip on days we don't have an afternoon activity. It is still much more flexible that if they were in a traditional school setting.

[NASDAQ]

We school year-round. Not much happens early in the morning.

[SailorMom]

We tried, but the kids' friends were all ps, and I was finding myself constantly changing school plans around so that they could hang out/play, etc. We have a pool, and I loved being the 'go-to' house over the summer, so I gave up pretty quickly.

Now that I only hs one of my sons, we tend to still do school on teacher planning days and the like at the PS so that we'll have more flexibility as far as days 'banked'.