I tried the whole scheduling thing.
8:30 am- Bible
9am- Math
10 am- 15 min break
10:15 am- Language
11 am- Penmenship
12 am- Lunch for 1 hour
Etc etc
Did NOT work for us. I know that some families thrive with this type of schedule. More power to them. We are much more relaxed than that.
Our typical day looks more like this:
Sleep until whenever (usually around 9am). Breakfast. Chores. Start school around 10ish (usually in our PJ's). School until lunch. Eat. A few more chores. Prek work is usually finished before lunch so I focus on finishing with the 3rd grader after lunch. Most of her independent work is done after lunch with just a few instructions from Mrs. Mom. I probably take an hour for PreK work and around 3 hours for 3rd grade work.
I usually try to fit in a full load every day even though our goals for the day are really light. We usually find ourselves ahead of the "schedule."
We start with prayer and Bible time. For preK we do beginning phonics and Math. She also sits in for History and Science when she feels like it. For 3rd grade we cover History, Science, Math, Language Arts, Penmanship, and Reading.
One day a week we have gymnastics. I also try to do my grocery shopping and such on this day. So we usually have a lighter school work load. This particular week we will be taking a day off so I can go pick up Mr. Dad from the airport.
The only thing I write down is our goals for the day. I sit down on a Sunday night to write down our goals. I started off doing this weekly but have moved to doing it monthly. I use a cheapo Walmart Mead Weekly/Monthly planner that lasts for a year. On the full calendar view page I mark the days we might need to take off (vacations, appointments, etc). On the daily view pages is where I jot down what I want covered for that day. Later, I mark it with a check when it's complete.
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Blessed are the flexible for they shall not get bent out of shape ;-)
I like your little quote.
ReplyDeleteOkay, when I first read you listing off the different hs styles in another earlier post, I categorized relaxed with unschooling. Now, I'll admit that I'm judging unschooling by its title but unschooling sounds like doing nothing to me or close to it. I still need to look it up to understand it more.
Now that I see what you mean by relaxed (your day isn't planned out by the hour but you still do stuff daily) I can definitely see that as being my style. Mostly because with preschool I'm making up the curriculum (considering I did it for a living before I had James with two year olds but my CDA credentials are for 3-5 year olds, I feel comfortable with this. I also bought books for this too from a teacher's store) and then I DID try scheduling us by the hour like you did. Well, I did shaky the first week, good the second and third and then I've taken a break since mid-October. Yikes! Although now the hold up is that my printer is screwy & claims we have a paper jam when we don't. We're going to buy a new one as soon as we can, hopefully soon. So I'm going to have to do this all by hand - still no excuse for me to have let it go this long. I CANNOT do that with Kindergarten or later because that'd be bad. So I'm thinking if I don't stress myself out by following an hourly schedule but instead a daily one - that would be good for me too. :)