Last year—and all my past homeschooling years—looked tremendously different from this one. Because this year I’m on a schedule!
I have actually planned out 15 weeks of lessons, including page numbers and skill lessons.
But I haven’t decided if I like it yet or not.
We are one week in at this point, and our first week was already bombarded with challenges that sought to throw our schedule off. I wondered if I would have to school on Saturday just to make sure we finished this past week’s work before we started what I had written in ink for the next week. Talk about stress!
Do you know why I have a schedule this year as opposed to the 11 prior years? Because without a schedule my kids lacked the same push I felt to progress through the week as we headed toward Friday. I was aiding and abetting little procrastinators.
Oh, I wanted to believe that I was being the best teacher possible by going at their pace. I believed I was giving them time to learn before moving on.
Please understand that I don’t own a complete curriculum or even order many books each year. So I’m not talking about simply dividing an index and covering those chapters over the course of a 180-day school year. Also, I write my own math problems for my youngest students. So I have wiggle room to add more work and various types of problems needed for mastery.
This was individualized education, I told myself. However, I am now convinced that it was “Mama getting bamboozled” and kids learning to “take their time” (to put it nicely).
Therefore, this seasoned, formerly idealistic homeschooler has made changes in the way she keeps a schedule.
Nowadays, school starts at 9 a.m. and goes until the work is finished. Sometimes that is noon. More often than not, it’s a little later than that.
One important change that I made was to schedule fun for our afternoons.
- Monday is Citizenship Day. This opens our first day of the week to wonderful field trip options designed to help others while fostering citizenship in my kids.
- Tuesdays we hold history/geography afternoons. We lie on the floor and reenact Civil War battles, go on map hunts, etc.
- Wednesdays are for science experiments. Boy oh boy, do my kids look forward to that day!
- Thursdays are for arts and crafts. The first craft we completed was to create stress balls!
- Friday is our day to focus on literature and grammar. This means library trips followed by afternoons full of reading.
These scheduled fun days were designed for learning. But having them scheduled has proven to be motivation for my kids to finish their daily assignments by noon, so they can take full advantage of the special afternoon activities they are growing to count on.
As this year zooms by, I hope to create efficient learners who are willing to push themselves and rise to any challenge.
One point I’d like to make is that I wrote out lessons for only 1/3 of the school year. This gives me room to reevaluate in December and allows me the freedom to slow down, speed up, review, or stay the same.
I no longer think of scheduling as a hindrance to learning. I’ve discovered that creative scheduling can enhance our homeschooling lives.
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Lisa Blauvelt (with her family and three dogs, two cats, a horse, pony, donkey, two red eared turtles, a fluctuating number of tadpoles and baby fish, and various other creatures collected by her adventurous boys) puts her education degrees to work at her home in the Deep South. There she teaches not only her own children, but others who come to her home to learn. Her decade long experience in teaching children to read will soon be published as a 476 page guide for parents.
