Trying to move from the speedway to a stroll

[Nscribe]

With July waning and August roaring in, I am finding myself asking where the summer went as we scramble to the next thing.  Dd has several summer related activities (camps/intensives/short trips) on the schedule for August.  We start "school"  full on the last week of August.  What I find myself asking is "how we can structure/approach the upcoming school year to feel less like we are on a speedway and more like we are on a journey?"  With a couple of classes outsourced (History, Latin, Science in part), we have less control over the flow than we might otherwise.  I am hoping that serves more to steady the pace than to escalate it, but we will see.  What types of adjustments are any of you trying in the upcoming year to savor more than survive?  I am looking for ideas.

 

 

[regentrude]

We front load by starting some at-home courses before the semester starts and DD is busy with her dual enrollment courses. We found that doing a substantial portion of math over the summer helps free up time and energy during the semester. Once the fall semester ends, we'll use the long winter break to finish math. last year, she did a huge amount of reading and English in late summer.

 

We also save stuff for the summer after. This year, history did not get finished "on time", so it gets finished after the spring semester is over.

 

I guess that means basically that we are spreading things out over the course of a calendar year, instead of trying to fit everything into two 16 week semesters. This allows DD to focus on her (very time consuming) university courses while classes are in session without us having to nag about home taught courses; there will be time for those, too.

[FloridaLisa]

I find that more and more, I cannot control the *speed* of high school demands as far as classes and extracurricular.  Classes just require more and the sports/music/dance/passion takes more time.   What I can try my hardest to control to give us some stroll along the speedway are:

 

*days out of the house. If we are always coming and going, my house becomes disordered and life just seems more hectic.

 

*cutting out non-essentials.  This differs for everyone, but for us, it has meant saying no to Sunday night and Wednesday night church and really enjoying a Sabbath rest. I think one of those will go back on the plate come fall, but not both.

 

*planning meals and actually eating them together at the table.  If I plan meals, there is no late afternoon rush to the store or rise in my blood pressure as I try to get food on the table. 

 

And, I'd really like to work in some planned teacher planning days this year.  Just a day here and there, not when the public schools are out, to catch up and r e l a x.  Not sure how that will look just yet, but I also feel the need to have some purposefully slow days. 

 

Lisa

[Nscribe]

TY both of you (Regentrude and FloridaLisa).  I wasn't sure if I was expressing the question well, but you both hit what I am mulling. 

 

That dance/theatre/music schedule rules us and focusing on a meal sitting down together is really something I think we may make an extra effort to do better this year.  It may have to be breakfast or lunch, but yeah it would be nice to reorient a bit in that direction.

 

This is the first summer in a while that I did not build in time to make sure some academics were done and we will see how that works for us as the Fall is under way.  Doing math in the summer has been a real help to the year's schedule in past years, this year will be a new challenge in that we didn't. 

 

One help is we will have less drive time than past years due to some consolidation of the extras.  Maybe that alone will take some of the frenzied feeling out of the mix.