Back to Homeschool Blog Hop – Planning the Homeschool Day

It’s getting to be that time of year again (sing songy voice)

Back to Homeschool!

And that means organization and scheduling in all the areas of my life. Yes ALL! Because if I don’t get scheduled and organized I can find myself struggling to catch up (and my daughter with me) when it comes to the end of another school year.

That’s what happened this past school year and it wasn’t due to being disorganized and having no schedule. Nope! Rather it was due to the unexpected happening and throwing our whole year off. The thing was it happened last summer…right before school.

My dear mother had a short stay in the hospital and I spent the first few months of homeschool caring for her and helping her get to the doctor and any other errands she had. She’s made a full recovery but because of her medication she doesn’t drive anymore and so I’m still her main source of transportation.

How did this throw a chink in our homeschool? Well it did and it didn’t. It took me maybe a month to acclimate our homeschool day to our new schedule but in the meantime we lost valuable school time which meant we went well into summer with our course work.

How can I avoid that this year?

Well you really don’t plan for things like sudden illness but I can put some routines into place to make sure we get our schooling done with all the outside responsibilities.

Decide how many hours a day to devote to official homeschool (even though really schooling goes on all the time), and finding a good time to begin each day.

Divide the time between subjects. 2 to 2 1/2 hours is a good amount of time for language arts (reading, writing, grammar, spelling, listening and speaking). Another hour for math. And the rest of the time can be divided among your other areas of study.

Carve out time for breaks. How many breaks do you have in your homeschool day? We started with two but now we take one big one. This worked really well for us last year so I plan on implementing it again this year.

Rearrange what classes to start the day with. When the Sweet Peanut was younger we started with Math as it seems her brain is freshest in morning. This past year I discovered that giving her something more relaxing before math meant better results in math class. Now, after our morning devotions we start with English class, then handwriting which is a short class, and then end with math before our break. After the break we come back with Reading, then Science/History, and then end with Spelling. We try to get some physical activity in either on our break or after all our school day is done.

Use a Calendar to keep track of the homeschool year. In our state we’re supposed to have 180 days of instruction. Bless Bob Jones efficient heart for laying out my school year for 180 days. It’s all in the Teacher’s Manual so what I actually do is just write the date on each day. We stick to our same daily schedule but follow the order in the Teacher’s manual.

So as you can see it’s not perfect but it works for us. The beauty is it’s flexible and I can change if things don’t work out.

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