Skip to main content

Tips & Tricks: School Schedule

 Some people might think that homeschoolers just lounge around most of the time, some might think we follow the same schedule as public school. Well, the beauty of homeschooling is that you can choose your schedule. We do not follow the same schedule as public school. Instead, I have chosen that we do school year round. Our school year starts the first Monday in January and we end the Friday before Christmas (so a 47 week school year). I take a week off for the birthdays of both our girls and my husband. I also take Thanksgiving week off. If you have read some of our post before you know that we do school Monday through Friday. Some choose to do school 3 or 4 days a week. It really just depends on what works best for your family.

Now, if you live in a state that has schedule laws for homeschool then you need to follow those but for Texas there are no such laws. The reason why I choose to do year round with very little time off from school is that way she does not have a long summer break to forget things. I noticed when I was in school that a lot of students would forget stuff during their 3 months off; especially with math. With having a longer school year than the normal (which is a 36 week year) we are able to go over less information each day. If our daughter needs more explanation or more work on a certain topic we have the whole day to do so. Unlike public school they have to stick to a strict schedule and even if a student does not understand they do not have the option of staying on a topic until the whole class has a proper grasp of the topic. With homeschooling you have that flexibility. 

Our days are much shorter than public school but that does not mean that we are learning any less. I have balanced out each day so that we do not have subjects that are to hard or to easy. Some of our items I have start at the beginning of the year and then when we are done with them a new item starts. This would be like if we had multiple things for a particular subject; often happens with art, STEM and thinking skills class. We do all of our subjects all year long though even if they are not a core subject. 

With homeschooling you also have the ability to choose when you do school. I do school in the morning. The number 1 reason I do this is because our daughter does better in the morning. If we were to do school later in the day she would have an attitude about it and I believe if a child has an attitude or is frustrated then they are not learning as well since they are not enjoying it. Below in the comments let me know how you homeschool. Do you school year round like us or have a shorter year? What does your school day look like? 



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Geoboards

A fun way to help kids get great hand-eye coordination isn’t with  Geoboards . I love that with these there are 4 boards included so you can use it with multiple students. The rubber bands are different colors and 2 different sizes. The pictures are fun, colorful and you get a bunch of them. My daughter really likes these. For some reason she thinks it’s so funny when the bands pop her. At first I just let her place the bands anywhere to get the idea of how to put them on. Then we started places them just on the white lines in the picture. She always wants to do more than one so I let her do as many pictures as she wants. I do wish there was a blanket picture so she could design her own things. 
1 comment
Read more

Tips & Tricks: Grading

When grading first thing you need to do is check your state laws on homeschool. Some states require you to keep record of your curriculum and and grading while some don’t. I do not have to keep any records or grading. Since I use Timberdoodle they have an awesome online scheduler that I use. It has all the curriculum that we use and in the check boxes I put the grades. At the end of each year I keep the scheduler pages so I have records. Below is how I grade things. I also do not show our daughter the grades or tell her them. I don’t want her to worry about getting a bad grade. When she’s in middle school and high school grades that’s when I’ll start letting her know about grade.  My grading system: Pre-K - 2 Grade: she will not see the grade E: excellent; no extra work needed; 100-90% S: satisfactory; give a little extra work; 89-80% N: needs improvement; give a lot of extra work; 79-0% 3 - 5 Grade: she will only see letter grade if she wants to know her grade A: 100-90%
Post a Comment
Read more

Tips & Tricks: Class Schedule

How do you make a class schedule? When do you do which subjects? How long do you do a class? Does each day look the same? It is easy to make a homeschool schedule since you can school however you like. Since we use Timberdoodle we have access to their online schedule which over the years has been updated to be an outstanding way to schedule our subjects. If you do not use Timberdoodle I would suggest using Excel. If you know a website that allows you to create a schedule (for free) then let me know in the comments. The first thing I do make our schedule is make a list of all of our items and mark which ones I think will be challenging and which will be easy. Core subjects would be harder than things like STEM and thinking skills. Then I use that list to make another list on what day we will do each item. Making sure that not one day will be to hard or to easy. I like it to be pretty even as well as each day having about the same number of items. Some subjects we do everyday those are E
Post a Comment
Read more