Don’t forget to change your clocks tonight! Fall back 1 hour…. the gain of 1 hour was such a boon as a grad student, or a young married, but adding children made all time changes just miserable. For some reason, kids don’t pay that much attention to clocks. Like you do.
Schedules
We are a homeschooling family, and figuring out how to schedule out days and work and life can be a bit tricky. Different personalities and different inclinations all in one house can be chaotic. When the kids are little, its fairly easy to just go with the flow. Diaper changes, naps, and eating times all create a routine that runs day in and day out. Littles just need time to play and explore their environment. Give them some outside time, some inside time, and lots of exploring time and they are set. But there comes the age when more structure is needed. What age that is is debatable. In several traditions, age 6 or 7 is the age when formal academics are begun. Some kids seem ready sooner, and lots of parents will start academics earlier than this. But I’m not here to argue when its appropriate to being formal academics, but most of us will agree it starts some time.
How you structure those days with formal academics varies from family to family, and individual to individual. I’ve got a friend who has 5 kids, from 10 yrs to 9 months, so her school days look rather different from ours, where we have a 7 yr old and a 2 yr old. This is just how we do it. Both Little Man and I are inclined towards more structured times, so that’s what I’ve gone with. We are pretty good that when we start our day of school, we finish it. But we’d have days when we just didn’t get to school, whether for outside activities, illness or what-have-you. A daily undated schedule has worked well meeting these needs.
How we do it
For year 1, or 1st grade, I created a 4 day a week “loop” with our subjects. We would do each day as a whole, but if we missed a day, that was okay, nothing was dated and we just went to the next day the next time we did school.
For each day, I wrote out that day’s assignments in a composition book. I’d write out a full week’s worth, each day on its own page, but none of the pages dated. We dated the page the day we did it.
For year 2, or 2nd grade, I was writing out assignments this same way. But I was overwhelmed by it taking 15 to 20 minutes each week to do. So, I asked Little Man if he would be okay with a full week on one page. He said he would, so we gave it a try. And now, this takes me less than 5 minutes to update the readings from the master list I have from amblesideonline.com.
I’m sure this will evolve again in future years, which is why I’ll reevaluate this method when we start year 3 work and regularly thereafter.
Dreaming
I also sometimes browse the catalog for Home Science Tools, and dream of the day I just might have a space in our home that is The Lab and I can legitimately purchase full on glassware for chemistry, and physics supplies and a nifty microscope…. maybe someday.
Do you have someday-dreams? I’d love to hear it!
