What are the benefits of having a regular, consistent start time for beginning school each day?
- Teaching your kids to avoid procrastination. Having to be ready for school at a certain time will encourage your kids to get themselves ready in the morning without dawdling and complaints.
- Avoiding the delays that encourage busy moms to put off school. Without a set start time, you might find a multitude of worthy things that need to be done in your home. That’s how homeschoolers miss doing school for days—or even weeks—at a time.
- Utilizing your kids’ best working hours. Starting in the morning means your kids will be schooling during their most optimal hours for learning. (Note: make sure your kids go to bed at a reasonable hour at night!)
- Finishing work early. When you start early, it’s quite possible to end early. This leaves the rest of the afternoon for guilt-free activities: playing, running errands, cooking, baking, taking music lessons, visiting homebound friends and neighbors, and more.
- Establishing an internal clock. You and your kids will learn to wake up at a regular time and have the built-in structure that enables a strong work ethic.
In our house, we’ve found that given the opportunity, our youngest children will get up early—but not to do school. They will want to watch movies, play with Legos, eat all morning long, etc.
Before we set a consistent school start time, our oldest daughter would go to bed late, sleep too long in the morning, lollygag out to the kitchen around noon or so looking for breakfast, and be too groggy to get much learning done. She often failed to finish her work before dinner time.
Nowadays, though my daughter complains that school starts at 9 a.m. on the dot and that I close the kitchen for breakfast by 8:50 a.m., she is the first to admit that she’s glad for the structure. My daughter knows fellow homeschoolers who did not have this scheduling “ball and chain,” and now even though they are older, their punctuality is suffering for it.
The younger students have grown to be efficient little workers because they want to finish school in time to build with their Lego’s, play in their fort, ride bikes, etc. They know that once they’ve learned, studied, and done their chores, these wonderful activities await them.
I know that this type of schedule is the best training for them to become men and women who work first and play later. That is a trait I will be proud to see established in my children as adults.
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.
